Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 8 February 2023.
Certainly I will follow up all of those points, Jenny Rathbone, Chair of the Equality and Social Justice Committee, with the UK Government and, indeed, with Ofgem. I said, 'You need a complete overhaul of regulations' to Ofgem, and we'll see what impact their enforcement powers have in terms of their investigations in terms of British Gas.
Yes, it did take Lord Justice Edis, as Mark Isherwood said, to stop those applications for warrants for prepayment meters in magistrates' and district judges' courts, so that's what the Counsel General is following up as well. They've ceased to be listed, but when you hear of the way that they were going through the back rooms of courts, people with no representation—£22, I think the Counsel General has been saying; the money that was made by the courts out of this—we need a review of the legislation. In fact, that is actually something that Lord Justice Edis said himself.
I think the point is, finally, that it is the most vulnerable and the poorest in society who are on prepayment meters. They should be scrapped. Yes, it is a choice for some, but one of the questions that has been asked, and I'm sure it has been asked in your cross-party groups, is: has remote installation stopped? No, I don't believe it has. Enforced installation has stopped, but remote installation is still going on.
Finally, I have asked for suppliers not to be making standing charges. They're the highest in north Wales in the whole of the UK, and very high in south Wales. And even if people cannot even feed their meters, they're still subject to the standing charges, so when they get their fuel vouchers, perhaps via us, they actually are paying off the standing charges. Isn't that an absolutely shocking situation, which we've got to address?