Comparison websites accused of hiding best energy deals

Five of the biggest energy comparison websites are hiding their best deals, The Big Deal has claimed.The company, itself an energy comparison website, alleged that it has found evidence that all the major price comparison websites hide the cheapest deal from customers.Angela Knight, the chief executive of Energy UK, said: "Comparison sites should not benefit from limiting options to customers. Not disclosing commission and not advertising the full array of deals on offer undermines the industry's work to be more up-front with customers."Switching energy supplier is a good way to save money on gas and electricity and comparison sites are a great way to help customers do this. The energy industry is committed to transparency and we expect others in the energy supply chain to do the same.""You won't like what we found," says Big DealThe Big Deal claimed websites use a mechanism to hide deals where they ask users if they want to see deals they can switch to "today" or "now". It said clicking "Yes" filters out all deals which do not earn the price comparison site a commission from the energy company and said that "often these deals are the cheapest"."We also believe this research shows these sites may be breaking EU consumer protection law. We've written to the five biggest sites - Compare the Market, Go Compare, Uswitch, Moneysupermarket and Confused - asking that they stop this activity," The Big Deal said."We've also asked government to take action, the Competition and Markets Authority to expand their inquiry into the energy market to include these sites and the EU Competition Commission to investigate their actions."The group said it had spent 13 weeks looking at the websites and have taken more than 200 screenshots of the alleged tactics.Consumer confidence codeAll five of the accused websites say they follow regulator Ofgem's consumer confidence code, which is being updated."Customers have the clear option to compare plans across the whole energy market on our site," said Uswitch. "We do not pre-select a default answer when giving them this choice, nor do we in any way influence what they should select."It added that it was "fully supportive of Ofgem's decision to strengthen the code".Comparethemarket.com pointed out that suppliers sometimes stipulate which tariffs they wish to sell on price comparison websites, while Moneysupermarket.com insisted its option for customers to filter results to only see products they can buy through the site is "necessary" and displayed "clearly and prominently".Confused.com said its consumers are able to view every available tariff on the market and explained that "some suppliers do not make certain tariffs available through comparison sites, so we give customers the option to exclude these from the results"."Highly orchestrated PR campaign" Gocompare.com lambasted The Big Deal's claims as "a highly orchestrated PR campaign being run by a company with a vested interest in moving customers away from comparison sites to their own collective switching model".It continued: "The Big Deal also makes its money by being paid a commission by the energy supplier to which its customers switch. The main difference being that The Big Deal only shows people a tariff from one provider, whereas Gocompare.com, for example, lets people see over 150 tariffs from across the market."The Big Deal is being very selective in the information it chooses to highlight in its report. For example, it conveniently fails to mention that on every single date researched by The Big Deal in October, Gocompare.com displayed the same cheapest tariff in every region they studied whether the customer had selected to see 'all deals' or just the ones to which they could switch via Gocompare.com. As this is the crux of The Big Deal's criticism of comparison sites, this is a very important omission."