In sympathy with New Yorkers, albeit inadvertently, I have had virtually no power for weeks. Worse, I have been warned that my lights are on an ancient system of fabric wiring which could burst into flames at any moment.
I have been trying to fix things, but have come up against a vicious circle of energy industry red tape. Or should I say blue tape? It is, after all, the deregulated version of petty bureaucracy. There is so much blue tape, in fact, that I, a collector of shares in every utility company to go on sale since I was 18, am beginning to question my commitment to privatisation. Hush my mouth!
To summarise: British Gas, my electricity supplier, came out when the lights blew two weeks ago and said the whole place needed rewiring. But they couldn’t help me further until the ancient electrical mains box had been replaced. And as it contained asbestos they could not touch it.
So they outsourced the job to UK Power Networks, who promptly outsourced it to a company called Skanska.
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