According to a new survey, just over 54% of UK homeowners claim that they regularly review their energy bills.
Utility Bidder surveyed 2,000 UK residents to find out their understanding of energy bills, their approach to reviewing their own energy bills and if they understand the most common terms associated with energy bills.
The research found that 21.60% of homeowners in Manchester do not regularly review their bills. This is the highest percentage of all cities in the UK.
Nearly 4% of respondents in Newcastle say they never check their bills beyond the amount due, which is the biggest proportion of any UK city and is followed by Belfast, 3.3%, Sheffield, 2.9% and Southampton, 2.4%. However, in Bristol 94.80% of respondents regularly review their energy bills.
Manchester and Sheffield are among the UK cities with the least understanding of energy bill terms. A total of 6.50% and 5.80% said they do not understand any of the terms credit, debit and tariff, which are all important vocabulary when it comes to understanding energy bills.
‘Smart meter’ is the most queried energy bill term on google over the past year with more than 1.2m searches, followed by ‘Winter fuel payment’, 652,900, and ‘Energy price cap’, 302,600.
James Longley, managing director at Utility Bidder, said: “With the cost of energy constantly fluctuating, understanding your energy bills and energy usage is critical. At Utility Bidder, we want British homeowners and businesses to be getting the best value for their energy, and help you get a better understanding of your spending.
“With this in mind, we’ve devised the Billing Awareness and Misconceptions Report which aims to highlight the most important questions when it comes to reviewing energy bills. To gather this data, we used TLF Research to create a survey asking respondents about how well they monitor and understand their energy bills.
“A selection of questions such as ‘do you regularly review your energy bills’ and do you get confused by your energy bill?’ were put to 2,000 UK respondents – and the findings are extremely interesting at a granular level.
“Just over 54% of respondents claim that they regularly review their bills. When these figures are broken down by gender, males, 57%, are more likely to review their energy bills regularly than females, 51.7%, whilst 63.4% of those aged 65+ take regular reviews into consideration, as opposed to 46.7% in the 25-34 age range.
“Our findings are also of great interest in determining the regions and major UK cities with the most considered approach to energy bills. For example, Manchester has the highest percentage of respondents who do not regularly review their bills of the 15 major cities included in our findings, as well as the highest percentage of people that get confused by their bill.”