Fair treatment rules that shape every energy campaign

In February 2023 a Times reporter took a job with Arvato Financial Solutions, a debt agency working for British Gas, and filmed contractors entering the homes of customers in arrears under warrant to fit prepayment meters. Among the households were a single father with a disabled daughter and a woman with severe mental health problems. British Gas suspended the practice within days. Ofgem then told every supplier in Great Britain to stop involuntary installations while it reviewed the market.

No marketing team wrote a word of that. It is still the sharpest case available on what fair treatment obligations do to campaign design, because the regulator judged a supplier on the distance between what it told customers and what it did to them. This lesson follows that case into the audience builder, the channel plan and the copy deck: who you may target, on what channel, in what tone.

What the British Gas case actually turned on

Nothing failed a truth test. The warrants were lawful, the arrears were real, the contracts allowed meter changes. What failed was the outcome standard inside the supply licence: treat customers fairly, communicate clearly, do not exploit vulnerability or lack of knowledge. Which regulator holds which power is the mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → the regulator lesson draws; the point here is that Ofgem does not publish a list of banned phrases, so the test applied after the fact is whether a customer in identifiable difficulty ended up worse off.

Ofgem's review of prepayment practices across suppliers found weak use of the vulnerability data suppliers already held and thin oversight of the third-party agents doing the work. Customers had told their supplier about a disability or a health condition, and that information did not reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition → the person at the door. British Gas paid compensation to affected households, and remediation across the sector ran into millions of pounds.

The rules that came out of it became licence conditions in November 2023, and they are unusually specific:

• at least 10 attempts to contact a customer before any involuntary installation, plus a site welfare visit
• no involuntary prepayment meter where someone in the home is over 75 without support, where there are children under two, or where a household member has a severe health condition
• switching a smart meter into prepayment mode remotely counts as an involuntary installation and carries the same conditions

Read that list as a marketer. Every one of those tests depends on data your CRMCRMCustomer Relationship Management: software and strategy to manage and analyse customer interactions throughout their lifecycle.View full definition → already holds. The same record that should have blocked an installation should be shaping, or blocking, a message.

Fair treatment starts in the audience builder

The most common vulnerability failure in energy marketing is not a bad ad. It is a good ad sent to the wrong list. A customer three months into a repayment plan receives "lock in your rate before your fixed deal ends". A household whose smart meter went into prepay mode last week receives a loyalty campaign celebrating their anniversary as a customer.

The mechanism is dull and repeats everywhere: collections flags live in one system, the marketing platform pulls a nightly or weekly extract from another, and the segment was built from a file that predates the arrears. If your suppression list refreshes more slowly than a customer's circumstances change, you do not have a suppression list. Any segment defined by arrears, payment method or Priority Services Register status should be signed off by whoever owns vulnerability policy, not by the campaign manager alone.

The opposite failure is quieter and just as real. Blanket-excluding PSR households or prepayment customers from every commercial message means the people with the least financial headroom never hear that they qualify for the £150 Warm Home Discount, or that a cheaper fixed tariff has opened to them. Around 4 million households in Great Britain pay by prepayment, and they have historically been offered the narrowest range of deals. Silence toward a household that would have gained is its own outcome, and Ofgem's standard is symmetric. If a fixed-rate offer genuinely excludes prepayment tariffs, say so in the creative rather than letting the customer find out at the quote screen.

Four drivers of vulnerability, borrowed from the FCA

The PSR is a blunt screen. It is household-level, self-declared, and often years old, and the account holder is frequently not the person at risk. A campaign that screens on PSR alone will miss most of the vulnerability in its own base.

The Financial Conduct Authority's guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers (FG21/1, published February 2021) is a better working model, even though energy supply sits outside FCA regulation. It names four drivers: health, life events, resilience and capability. Three of those are temporary states. Bereavement, a hospital discharge, a new baby, redundancy: none of them appear on a register, all of them change how a "your bill is going up" email lands. The FCA's Consumer Duty, in force from 31 July 2023, goes further on communications, expecting firms to test whether messages are understood by the people who receive them rather than only checking that legal signed them off. Borrow the test. A tariff email that a compliance lawyer finds accurate and a customer with limited literacy finds unreadable has failed the only standard that matters after the fact.

Channel choice is a fair-treatment decision

Doorstep and outboundoutboundProactive outreach that pushes your message to targeted audiences through advertising, email, or direct prospecting, initiated by the seller rather than the buyer.View full definition → telephony concentrate the risk, because the customer has no time to compare, no written record, and a person in front of them. The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give a 14-day cancellation right on doorstep and distance sales, which must be stated verbally and confirmed in writing rather than read fast at the end of a call. Implied urgency with no genuine expiry has been an enforcement flashpoint for years.

Some practical channel arbitrations:

• Do not route outbound calling into segmentssegmentsDividing a market into distinct groups of customers who share similar needs, characteristics or behaviours, so each group can be served with a tailored approach.View full definition → flagged for cognitive impairment or communication needs. Use letter with a follow-up window, and honour any nominated third party on the account, since a carer or family member may be who your message actually reaches.
• An SMS offer expiring the same day, sent to customers who top up weekly, is pressure by design regardless of what the copy says.
• Automated low-balance and debt alerts should never carry a commercial upsell in the same message. Transactional and promotional streams need separate templates and separate approval.

Tone: the words that read differently in a cold house

Citizens Advice estimated that around 3.2 million people in Great Britain went without power at some point during 2022 because they could not afford to top up a prepayment meter. That is the audience receiving your retention copy.

Loss framing ("don't miss out", "act before Friday") is standard acquisition practice and reads as a threat to someone rationing heating. Replace deadline urgency with eligibility clarity: what the customer qualifies for, what it costs, what happens if they do nothing. Drop conditional savings language entirely for prepayment and arrears segments, because a saving that depends on usage the customer cannot afford is not a saving. And check the second-order effect of your own success metric: a campaign optimised to shift customers onto direct debit will find the customers least able to sustain one, and a failed direct debit generates fees, arrears and, eventually, the meter case this lesson opened with.

Following the case through to your sign-off

British Gas ended up with contact-attempt minimums, welfare visits and named exclusions written into its licence. A marketing function should copy the structure, not wait for it. Keep a written record of who was excluded from each campaign and why, and who was deliberately included despite a vulnerability flag, held for as long as you hold the claims substantiation file. Name one person who can stop a send on vulnerability grounds; the ordering of the wider sign-off gates belongs to the checklist lesson, what matters here is that this gate exists and has an owner with veto power.

Ofgem publishes its supplier licence conditions and consumer vulnerability material openly: Ofgem's Standards of Conduct guidance.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How Ofgem regulates energy suppliers" - youtube.com - search Ofgem's official channel for explainer content on licence conditions and consumer protection enforcement]

Key Takeaways

• The British Gas prepayment case failed on outcome, not accuracy: the supplier held the vulnerability data and did not act on it, and the resulting licence conditions now specify 10 contact attempts, a welfare visit and named household exclusions.
• Stale suppression lists are the most common marketing failure mode here, because collections data and campaign data usually live in different systems and refresh at different speeds.
• Over-suppression is also a fair treatment failure: excluding PSR and prepayment households from every offer keeps the £150 Warm Home Discount and cheaper tariffs out of reach of the people who need them.
• The FCA's four drivers of vulnerability (health, life events, resilience, capability) catch the temporary circumstances a PSR flag never will.
• Channel and tone are compliance decisions: no outbound calling into communication-needs segments, no same-day expiry offers to weekly top-up customers, no upsell inside a low-balance alert.