Extra Energy the worst for complaints, says Citizens Advice

One of the UK’s newest power companies was also the worst for customer complaints, it was revealed on Friday, with Extra Energy coming into the firing line.

Data released by the Citizens Advice charity showed that in the first quarter of this year, Extra Energy had the highest number of complaints at 1,682 per 100,000 customers.

It was also the highest number of complaints in the five years the data has been collected.

Extra put its own spin on the data, claiming it was a result of its cut-price offering.

“We failed to anticipate just how attractive our low prices would be to householders and unfortunately we didn’t put customer service resource in place quickly enough,” said managing director of operations Ben Jones.

Extra Energy - launched in 2014 - undercuts many of its established rivals on price, which it claims is possible due to a more a efficient customer management and billing system.

But it was that very system that appears to be the cause of many of the complaints, with 72.4% of those reported to Citizens Advice relating to billing.

The second-worst supplier was Co-operative Energy, which received 819.3 complaints per 100,000 customers - an improvement on the 1148.8 it received in the fourth quarter of last year.

Co-op has previously flagged problems with its billing system as well.

The top performing suppliers were SSE, Flow Energy and EDF Energy, at 28.4, 32.6 and 35.4 complaints per 100,000 customers respectively.