Timeyin Akerele

So when the Ukraine invasion happened, the price of gas went dramatically higher for the whole of Europe, including Britain.

And that caused a lot of problems in the energy sector, obviously huge problems for households and businesses who were having to pay higher bills.

But it also revealed some instability and vulnerabilities in the retail market.

So a lot of the

Retailers, we call them energy suppliers, went bust during that time.

So there were a lot of lessons for Ofgem in how to handle that.

And we have invested really strongly now in a new regulatory process by which suppliers have to demonstrate their resilience so they can take financial shocks and not necessarily go out of business.

That doesn't mean an energy supplier won't fail or won't go out of business.

If they do a bad service or they want to exit the market, then we still need that fluidity, the ability to enter and exit the market.

But what we have improved is the stability of the sector.

Yeah, more than half of the energy suppliers.

That's quite a lot.

They hadn't hedged properly, was the basic problem, and then they were faced with a massive shock that because of the way the price cap works, they couldn't fully recover their costs.

So...

That is a sort of interaction of different factors that we think we have now tackled so that if there were to be another surge in energy prices, which obviously we're all conscious about, we think the sector is much more resilient than it was then.

So...

If you like, there was a philosophy of regulation that you should encourage open markets, you should encourage competition.

And I don't think anyone expected the level of shock to the sector that we saw when gas prices went up.

At peak, they went up about eightfold over their previous levels.

I mean, that sort of shock is something that would really...