2025 began with our electricity supplier (EDF) announcing our monthly payments were dropping by £40 or so, which was welcomed. Even with the reduction, we were still £266 in credit last month, so it may be falling again soon.
In February, Yorkshire Water sent a renewal notice for our unmetered supply. The monthly payment was to rise from £87 to £100. This was over eight months, so £800 a year for water. We decided that seemed excessive and enquired about getting a water meter, to see if we might save money. YW fitted this on 17 March (this was a bit of a saga, but I won’t bore you with the disaster, except to say it took several visits and about a week before it was all working properly without leaking), and we got a new estimate based on the occupancy and the anticipated average consumption.
Our new (12-month) contract is for £30 per month, and it now seems that may be too high. Our annual cost will be well under £350. Quite a saving, eh? If only we had known years ago.
Next, our two-year broadband contract came up for renewal this month, and BT, began to send emails suggesting I look at their website to find renewal offers. Bear in mind, we have been with BT since moving here in 1985. Living in a very rural area, we only have fibre to the cabinet (fttc) which is about a mile away, and the final connection is by the old copper telephone wire. We have no date for when we might have fibre to the premises (fttp) although neighbours close by in the other direction are already connected.
The best speed we get is under 10 Mbs, at the BT router, less at our devices (7.1 Mbs as I type this this morning). BT guarantees 9 MBs. Upload is usually about 0.1 - 0.3 Mbs. We are paying a princely £68.86 per month, with calls on top, although we tend to use mobiles for most calls. We are in a terrible reception area for mobile coverage, too, so our mobile phones are all set to use wi-fi calling when at home.
We were also advised to have BT’s Hybrid Connect, which puts us on EE mobile broadband automatically, if we ever lose the fixed-line method. However, the EE signal is extremely weak so we don’t use it much, if ever.
Anyway, on 4 July, BT sent an email:
They were happy for us to renew at the same price, what they said was the "best available offer" for us, and claimed new customers would pay £83.99 for the same package.
We looked at getting mobile broadband but this probably needed an external antenna and we couldn't be sure what sort of signal we might get. We can see ourselves via Hybrid Connect that we struggle to get one bar if we're lucky. We don’t need gigabit speeds so we decided to check out other fixed line suppliers and found Sky and Vodafone were offering broadband - essentially using the same line we have now - for £25 a month.
We decided to switch and did it online, which also included a £70 gift voucher.
Incredibly, and literally within seconds, an email from BT popped up saying they’re sorry to see us go and to call them if we wanted to discuss it. This is it:
We didn’t bother, thinking there was no way BT could match Vodafone. Little did we realise.
Later that evening (Monday), another email came barrelling in with a new ‘offer’ of - wait for it - £23.99 a month! Take a look at this:
Now I realise this isn't identical to what we have at the moment, but it isn't very different. I was frankly gobsmacked. I thought BT might offer a sweetener but really, this was not far off one-third of what we were paying! My reaction was to finally see that they were just taking advantage of us for being loyal customers. But it got worse.
The following morning I had two missed calls on my mobile. I called the number to find it was Stepchange Outsourcing at Stevenage on behalf of BT, trying to get me to change my mind and offering an even lower £21 per month!!! I said they were wasting their time.
On Wednesday, I had yet another call from Stepchange (“experts in delivering sales, retention and customer experience campaigns”) this time offering yet another (unspecified) price cut plus some extra equipment!. This was amazing and insulting at the same time. Imagine being offered an apparent 75% discount - without even asking! I realised we had been essentially ripped off for years.
Next, we started to think about our TV services from Sky. We don’t get the Sports or Cinema packages and only take Sky Essentials for £51 per month. We realised that the only channels we actually watch are ones available on Freeview and the only benefit we get from having a Sky+ box is the ability to pause and record TV programmes, something we do quite often.
Also, there is a tree in our garden which affects TV reception via our Sky dish, so we are sometimes forced to use terrestrial TV anyway. And we noted that we won’t be able to receive the satellite signal at all after 2027, when the Astra 2 satellite is turned off. New Sky customers need to receive their TV through the web, which requires a minimum of 25 Mbps for smooth streaming. We can only dream of that speed. That option is impossible for the foreseeable future.
However, we also noted you can now buy a Freeview box with the ability to pause and record all the Freeview channels for a modest one-off £169 via your own terrestrial aerial (ours is in the loft) with no contract. So, that’s the next thing for us. Goodbye to Sky.
The effect of all this is that by the end of the year, we will be paying about £2000 a year less for power, water, broadband, and TV than we were at the start!
I imagine that none of this will come as a surprise to you, but it was for us.
These are private (and privatised) businesses. We used to have power, water and phone (i.e. broadband) services provided by government-owned companies, and you didn't need to wade through hundreds of different options every year or so to find "the best offer" to suit your needs.
What we have now is a hotch-potch of dozens of different 'providers' of energy and telephone who use exactly the same infrastructure but simply alter the billing arrangements so we get this endless 'churn' of account switching as they all seek to offer new customers cheap solutions in the hope they will eventually pay through the nose later, due to lethargy.
I am not convinced that there is any overall benefit on average. The most loyal customers are 'rewarded' with the highest prices, while newer and more savvy users get the lowest. OK, in some cases we have got more innovation more quickly than we perhaps otherwise would have, but at the cost of a far more inefficient system with huge waste of time, effort, and equipment.
This can't be what privatisation was all about, surely?
