Energy firm SSE in UK cuts

Energy firm SSE said it would cut jobs in its customer service and metering teams in Britain as the company faces a perfect storm of stiff competition, higher costs and a cap on how much it can charge.

Britain and Ireland’s largest trade union Unite said SSE would cut 444 jobs, or around 5% of employees, in its retail business, blaming a lack of interest from customers for the smart meter devices that could help cut energy emissions.

Britain has a goal to roll out around 50 million smart meters to almost 30 million homes by the end of 2020. However, customers have been put off by early teething problems and issues with some of the first meters’ inability to function if households switched suppliers. SSE said it was offering voluntary redundancy, without specifying how many jobs would be lost.

The Irish Examiner reported last month that SSE which trades as SSE Airtricity in Ireland has no plans to exit the consumer-retail market here. It has around 740,000 in the Republic.

“Like a number of suppliers, we are facing challenges due to competition increasing, the introduction of the energy price cap and higher operating costs,” chief operating officer and co-head of retail, at SSE Energy Services Tony Keeling, said.

He added that in order to run a sustainable business the company needed to become more efficient.

The shares fell almost 3% in London. Britain’s energy regulator Ofgem was told by parliament last year to cap energy prices after lawmakers said customers were being overcharged for electricity and gas. Prime Minister Theresa May had called the tariffs a “rip-off”.

However, Ofgem gave the green light to suppliers to increase bills by more than 10% from April 1 after a rise in wholesale energy prices. SSE is not the only one of Britain’s big six energy suppliers — which also include Centrica’s British Gas, Iberdrola’s Scottish Power, Innogy’s npower, and EDF Energy — to announce job cuts. Unite, which has more than 4,000 members in SSE’s 20,000 strong workforce, said it had been working with the company to avoid job cuts over the last six months but the take up of new meters had not improved.

Reuters. Additional reporting Irish Examiner