A Trusted Brand

British Gas, which recently raised its prices by several times the rate of inflation, has branched out into the insurance business, selling peace of mind and "expert boiler care" for between £200 and £300 a year. Expert boiler care and peace of mind not being part of British Gas' standard service, the insurance package is particularly popular with the elderly. The managing director of British Gas Services is confident that British Gas delivers "among the highest levels of service in the industry". With the executive dynamism we have come to expect of what used to be known as the utilities, the managing director of British Gas Services informs us that, while "there is always room for improvement", British Gas customers "have come to accept nothing but the best from a trusted brand like British Gas."

Internal documents leaked by an embittered and probably sexually inadequate call centre worker at British Gas note that "We are experiencing extreme difficulties in meeting our customer requirements". According to the tale-tattler, "a significant number of 80-year-olds were left without heating for several days during the recent cold spell, possibly putting lives at risk". Staff "regularly come across pensioners being left several days without heat" and, presumably as a result of some distortion in service-competitivising market forces, "every third or fourth call into British Gas's four customer service centres is currently from someone complaining about poor service".

One must make allowances, of course. The recent winter, which took British Gas unawares by arriving at the end of the year, has been "the coldest in nine years", with "the highest number of breakdowns on record". British boilers work best in the summer. Nevertheless, the vast majority of customers are "very satisfied with the company's response to fixing breakdowns". Sixty per cent of customers were "offered an appointment the same day", which is to say that only forty per cent of customers had to spend one or more winter nights without any heating.

As part of the improvement for which there is always room, call centre staff were told in November that customers without heat and/or hot water "should have appointments booked on a non-urgent basis". This lasted for about eight weeks - in other words, well into January. Also, during the past two months, "customers have had to wait up to six days for an engineer to come out. If parts were needed, it would often be several more days before a boiler was repaired" and "jobs are regularly cancelled without informing the customer, who may be waiting for the engineer in a cold house". In a shocking indication of the company's cavalier attitude to the things that really matter, shareholder requirements don't even seem to have been mentioned.