Martin Lewis

What Octopus does, and I understand why it does this, is it says, if you want to leave the tracker and go to a price cap or go to a fix, you can, but then you can't come back for nine months.

So you're going to have to wait nine months before you sign up to it again.

And that makes it difficult.

I don't think you've been overpaying that prohibitively on electricity.

You have been overpaying a little bit compared to the price cap.

I'm not actually having a go at Octopus.

This tariff does what they've always said it does.

It moves with wholesale rates.

So in summary, the tracker tariff you have probably in the April price cap period, so April, May, June, paid more on the tracker at a guess than you would have done on the price cap, but only slightly more, mainly because of gas prices.

But if they stayed at the same level as they are now on the tracker, at the same volatility, and often, you know, what's going on in the Middle East is going on in the Middle East, and if it continues at that rate, unless it gets far, far worse, we assume it'll stay roughly the same.

It's probably slightly cheaper than the new July price cap, which is going up 13% on average, and gas prices particularly, they're going up, I think it's 26%.

So much of the rise is on gas.

So the rate you're paying on gas actually is less on the tracker than on the price cap will be in July.

So I don't think it's that big a risk to stay on it in July if you're hoping to stay on it long term once things go back to normal, rather than having to pay the effective nine month penalty of being off it if you leave it now.

It's up to you, basically.

Long winded way to say it's up to your attitude to risk.

When I listened back to this, it occurred to me I hadn't mentioned fixed rate tariffs.

And I know some of you will be thinking about what is the impact comparing to the tracker tariff to getting a fix?

Well, right now at the time of recording, I'm afraid there are very few cheap fixes.

I mean, the cheapest fix you can get is not much cheaper than the April price cap.