Writing price and savings claims that survive scrutiny

# Writing price and savings claims that survive scrutiny

In 2023, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA, the country's main competition and consumer protection regulator) forced multiple energy suppliers to rework "save up to £X" messaging because the discounts were calculated against reference prices almost nobody actually paid. The claims were not lies. They were unsubstantiated. That distinction is where most enforcement action in this sector lives, and it is why "save up to" is one of the most dangerous phrases in energy marketing.

This lesson works through why these claims fail, what evidence would have saved them, and how to build a pre-launch check that catches the problem before a regulator does.

Why energy savings claims are structurally risky

Energy pricing has a feature most retail categories don't: a moving, regulated reference point. In Great Britain, Ofgem (the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) sets a periodic price cap limiting what suppliers can charge on default tariffs. Any claim like "save £200 a year" implicitly compares your offer to *something*, and that something changes every few months.

Three common failure patterns:

• Comparing against a stale baseline. A tariff comparison built on last quarter's cap or a withdrawn "average" bill overstates savings once prices move.
• "Up to" claims driven by a small minority. If only 3% of customers with unusually low consumption could ever 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.Voir la définition complète → the maximum saving, "save up to £300" is misleading for the typical reader.
• Cherry-picked comparator tariffs. Comparing your fixed deal against the most expensive standard variable tariff on the market, rather than a representative one, inflates the apparent gap.

None of these require dishonesty. They require sloppy substantiation, which is exactly what regulators test for.

The rulebook: who enforces what

Three bodies matter for UK energy marketing claims, and international learners should mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.Voir la définition complète → these to local equivalents (the FTC in the US, national consumer authorities across the EU).

Ofgem sets sector-specific rules, including the Standards of Conduct for suppliers, which require communications to be clear, fair, and not misleading. This sits inside broader supply licence conditions.

The CMA enforces general consumer protection law, principally the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPUT), which bans misleading actions and omissions in any commercial claim, energy included.

The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) administers the CAP Code (Committee of Advertising Practice Code) for non-broadcast ads and the BCAP Code for broadcast. The ASA cannot fine you, but it can force ads down and refer repeat offenders to Trading Standards or the CMA, and adverse rulings are public and reputationally costly.

In the EU, the relevant frame is the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) plus national energy regulators (e.g., Germany's Bundesnetzagentur, or ACER at EU level for wholesale market oversight). The underlying test is nearly identical everywhere: would the claim mislead the average consumer and affect their decision?

Real triggers for action

Comparison tariff sites and "cheapest deal" claims. The ASA has repeatedly ruled on claims where a supplier or comparison site said a tariff was the "cheapest" without an adequately representative or current dataset behind it. See the ASA's published rulings database for searchable precedent, it's a genuinely useful free research tool before you write a claim.

Fixed vs. variable savings math. Several 2022 to 2023 complaints centered on suppliers advertising fixed-tariff savings against the price cap at a moment when the cap itself was temporarily elevated by wholesale gas prices, a comparison that looked dramatic but wasn't representative of a typical annual cycle.

Smart meter and efficiency savings. Claims like "cut your bill by installing a smart meter" have drawn scrutiny because a smart meter itself saves nothing, it's the behavior change it enables that might, and evidencing behavior change is much harder than citing a device spec.

What substantiation actually looks like

Before any claim goes live, you need a file, not a hunch. For a savings claim, that file should contain:

1. The exact baseline used for comparison, dated, named, and defensible as representative (e.g., Ofgem's published price cap figure for a specific quarter, applied to typical consumption values, not a hand-picked high-price outlier).

2. Typical Domestic Consumption Values (TDCV), the Ofgem-defined standard usage benchmarks (in kWh) used so that "average household" claims are comparable across suppliers rather than based on your own custom definition of average.

3. The proportion of customers who could actually achieve the top-line saving, if you use "up to." ASA guidance requires this be a genuinely achievable, non-trivial segment, not a rounding error of super-low-usage households.

4. A recency test: is the comparator price still live, or has the market moved since the claim was drafted? Energy wholesale prices can shift materially within weeks.

5. Consumption-sensitivity disclosure: savings claims that vary sharply with usage pattern need a clear, proximate caveat, not a buried footnote.

A simple worked example

Say you want to claim "save up to £180 a year versus a standard variable tariff."

• Reference price: Ofgem price cap for a representative TDCV household, as of the specific date you're publishing (this is a real, publicly updated figure, check Ofgem's current price cap page rather than reusing an old number).
• Your fixed tariff annual cost at the same TDCV.
• Difference = your headline saving, but only if calculated at the *same* consumption level for both sides.
• Then test: what share of your target customer base has consumption close enough to TDCV that the saving is broadly representative, not just achievable by the lowest 5% of users? If under roughly a third of customers get within a reasonable range of the headline figure, "up to" is doing too much work and needs qualifying language or a range instead of a single number.

Building the pre-launch compliance check

A workable pre-launch gate for any price or savings claim needs four checkpoints, ideally owned jointly by marketing and a compliance or legal reviewer, not marketing alone:

• Source check: is the baseline data current, named, and traceable to a public regulator figure (Ofgem cap, published wholesale index) rather than an internal estimate?
• Representativeness check: does the claimed saving apply to a genuinely substantial share of the target audience, and is that share documented?
• Clarity check: is the comparison basis stated in or immediately next to the headline claim, not in small print three scrolls down? The ASA treats proximity of qualifying information as central to whether an ad misleads.
• Time-stamp and refresh check: is there an owner and a trigger (e.g., every price cap update) to refresh or pull the claim before it goes stale?

Keep this as a one-page sign-off document per campaign. If a regulator asks "how did you support this claim," the answer should be a retrievable document, not a reconstructed memory.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How the Energy Price Cap Works" - youtube.com/@Ofgem - Ofgem's own explainer on the price cap mechanism that underpins most UK energy savings comparisons]

Key Takeaways

• Most enforcement action against energy savings claims targets weak substantiation, not deliberate deception: stale baselines, unrepresentative comparators, and "up to" figures only a small minority could reach.