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Energy Ombudsman

What is the Energy Ombudsman?

The Energy Ombudsman is a free, independent service that settles complaints between energy customers and the companies that supply or arrange their energy. It’s open to domestic customers and microbusinesses, but only after you’ve complained to the company first and either reached deadlock or waited eight weeks. It can order an apology, a correction or compensation, and its decision binds the company. This entry explains who can use it, what it covers, and how the process works.

The Energy Ombudsman handles disputes between energy customers and the companies that supply or arrange their energy. It’s free to use, independent of suppliers, and its rulings bind the company without taking away your right to go elsewhere if you’re unhappy with the outcome.

What the Energy Ombudsman actually is

The Energy Ombudsman is a free, independent body that settles complaints between energy customers and the companies that supply or arrange their energy. It isn’t a regulator and it isn’t a court. Think of it as a neutral referee that steps in when you and your supplier have hit a wall.

It’s approved by Ofgem to handle disputes, and using it costs you nothing. The company pays a case fee whether it wins or loses, which is part of why the scheme stays free at the point of use for customers.

The key thing to understand is independence. The Ombudsman doesn’t work for your supplier and doesn’t work for you. It looks at the evidence from both sides and reaches a decision based on what’s fair and what the rules say.

Who can use it

Two groups are covered. The first is domestic customers, meaning households on a standard home energy account. The second is microbusinesses, and this is where a lot of business owners get caught out.

A microbusiness is defined by fairly narrow thresholds: broadly, fewer than ten employees and turnover or balance sheet under a set figure, or low annual consumption of electricity or gas. The figures shift, so it’s worth checking your current position rather than assuming. If your business sits inside those limits, you get the same access to free dispute resolution that households do.

Larger businesses negotiating bespoke energy contracts generally don’t qualify. More on why that distinction matters further down.

What complaints it covers

The Ombudsman handles most of the things that genuinely go wrong between a customer and an energy company. Billing is the big one. Charges that look wrong, estimated readings that never get corrected, bills for accounts you thought were closed, or disputes over out-of-contract rates you didn’t expect to be paying.

It also covers problems with switching, Switches that stall, transfers that go to the wrong supplier, or final bills that arrive months after you’ve moved on.

Supply issues sit within its remit too, along with customer service failures. If you’ve been left without a sensible response for weeks, that’s a complaint in itself. And in certain cases it covers complaints about energy brokers and third parties, but only where the broker belongs to the scheme. That last point catches people out, so it’s worth reading the broker section carefully.

How the process works

There’s an order to this, and you can’t skip the first step. You have to complain to your supplier or broker first and give them a fair chance to put things right.

If you’ve complained and eight weeks have passed without the matter being resolved, you can take it to the Ombudsman. You can also escalate sooner if the company sends you a deadlock letter, which is a written confirmation that it considers the complaint closed and there’s nothing more it will do. Either of those two triggers opens the door.

When you bring a case, you submit your side with whatever evidence you have. Emails, bills, meter photos, notes of phone calls with dates. The Ombudsman asks the company for its account, weighs both, and reaches a decision. It’s an evidence exercise, so the customer who has kept a paper trail tends to be in a stronger position.

What it can decide and award

If the Ombudsman finds in your favour, it has real teeth. It can require the company to apologise. It can order a correction, so a wrong bill gets put right or charges get removed. And it can require the company to pay compensation where you’ve been left out of pocket or messed about.

Here’s the part worth holding onto. The decision binds the company but not you. If the company accepts the ruling, which it must once you accept it, it has to carry it out. But you’re free to reject the outcome. If you do, you keep your right to pursue the matter through other routes, including the courts. Accepting the decision is the point at which it becomes binding, so you’re never trapped by a result you think is unfair.

Compensation figures are modest in most cases and tied to the actual detriment. A figure of around fifty pounds for poor handling, say, is the kind of order you might see, though that’s illustrative and the real amount depends entirely on the case.

What it can’t do

The Ombudsman has limits, and knowing them saves wasted effort. It won’t set energy prices or tell you a tariff is too expensive. Pricing is a commercial matter, not a complaint, unless the company has charged you something it shouldn’t have under the contract.

It can’t act before you’ve gone through the supplier’s own complaints process. Skip that and your case gets sent straight back. It doesn’t handle complaints from larger businesses outside the microbusiness definition. It also can’t deal with matters already in court, and it won’t reopen a case once you’ve accepted a final decision.

It isn’t a substitute for the regulator either. Wider questions about market rules sit with Ofgem, not the Ombudsman.

Brokers and the ADR angle

This is the part most business customers don’t know about. Energy brokers, also called third-party intermediaries, can fall under the Ombudsman through what’s known as alternative dispute resolution, or ADR.

The catch is membership. The Ombudsman can only handle a broker complaint if that broker has signed up to its scheme. A broker that hasn’t joined sits outside the net, which means you’d have far weaker recourse if a deal went wrong. This is one practical reason to check a broker is legitimate before you sign anything, and scheme membership is a fair question to ask up front.

The kinds of broker complaints covered include misleading information about a contract, commission that was never disclosed, or being moved onto terms you didn’t agree to. Understanding what an energy broker actually does and knowing how to choose one goes a long way toward never needing the Ombudsman in the first place. A broker that explains commission clearly and puts terms in writing is a broker you’re unlikely to be complaining about later.

Why microbusiness status matters

The line between a microbusiness and a larger business is more than a definition. It decides whether this free protection is open to you at all.

Microbusinesses get it because the rules treat them a little like households. They don’t usually have a procurement team or in-house energy expertise, so the safety net is there for the same reason it’s there for a family on a domestic tariff. A corner shop disputing a wrong bill shouldn’t have to go to court to get it fixed.

Larger businesses negotiating bespoke contracts are assumed to have negotiated their own terms with their eyes open, often with advisers. That assumption pushes them outside the scheme. It’s worth knowing where your business sits before a dispute arises, partly because checking your bills properly often heads off the kind of problem that ends up in front of an ombudsman in the first place. If you’re a microbusiness, the protection is there. The trick is knowing it exists before you need it.

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