The Statutory Advocate - Tom Lowe, Citizens Advice

Yeah, I like this idea of being kind and actually it's really about being human and taking care of each other and just noticing that things are happening and we have our own blind spots and organizations have their blind spots and we need to make sure these blind spots are made visible to fix the places where they don't really deliver.

So That's also very interesting because the previous episode of this podcast was with Bernina Campbell and the blueprint for inclusive energy services in the Italian energy market.

So that really circles back to this idea that it's not about opposing the supplier, but it's really about being very constructive and gathering the evidence to allow for markets to deliver better such essential services in a way that is fair and sustainable socially for everyone.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's been rare.

It does occasionally happen, but it's been rare in my career where someone's pointed something out and said, this is not working well.

And someone's gone, you know, I'm not going to fix it.

It's not my problem.

Normally people go, I didn't realise that, or thank you for bringing that to our attention.

We will look at it.

And obviously they have other priorities and things they need to do.

But the very fact that someone like us is there raising these issues that we're hearing firsthand from consumers via our advice service, as well as anybody research we do, we take it to the government, we take it to the regulators, we take it to the energy companies, and they generally welcome it because it does give them a new perspective.

There are some instances where people have gone, no, we don't agree, but that's also part of this process.

They may disagree, they may have a different perspective on what we're saying, there may be a reason why they're doing what they're doing, but as long as that's a healthy debate and a constructive debate, then that is part of the overall process.

Yeah.

Yeah, and what's interesting also in your career throughout the past 16 years is that sometimes it takes time, right? For an idea or a change, like a very systemic change to happen, right? Because you start collecting the evidence and then you see that it's much bigger than what you initially thought.

And then you realize across different stakeholders, different sectors, et cetera, that the problem exists.

And then, you know, you have, like, you build the momentum, right? And arrives the moment where you build this momentum and when regulators or businesses are ready to act.

And that may take more time than what you would have wanted initially, but that happens, right? Yeah.

I think a lot of advocacy work takes multiple years.

I mean, the longest example I can think of from my career is that back in 2010, one of the first things I worked on was energy brokers taking advantage basically of small businesses in the UK energy market.

And it's taken nearly 15 years for Ofgem to actually start directly regulating those energy brokers.

Not all of them are like that.

It's always a subset of who tend to be bad apples in this space.

But it's taken that long, over a decade and a half, to go from there's clearly a problem here to actually the answer must be direct regulation, which is what we were saying at Consumer Focus 15 years ago.