It’s a government scheme which provides organisations such as Great Places and Plumlife with a discount on the cost of their gas and electricity. It applies to gas and electricity purchased from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024 and only applies to higher energy contract costs. Where an organisation has managed to buy cheaper energy, no discount is applicable. 

It applies to all customers who pay Great Places or Plumlife for electricity, gas and / or heat through service charges, prepayment sub-meters, and / or metered bills. It does not include any electricity or gas supplies for which you pay the supplier directly. Your energy bill will still be higher than usual because the scheme will not cover the total amount of the energy cost increase, only some of it. 

The scheme applies to all landlord and communal gas and electricity supplies which cost more than a set threshold, including those which are used to provide private electricity and heating to customers. All of the benefit of any scheme received will be passed onto customers and the reduced gas and electricity costs will be used in calculating charges / bills, except where Great Places has further subsidised this cost and it is lower as a result. As the cost of energy has gone up significantly your energy bill is still higher than usual and so the savings may not be obvious on your bill. We don’t make any profit on your energy bill.

The domestic price cap and the energy price guarantee does not apply to commercial contracts like housing associations have even though it’s for domestic use.

The government has not made any announcement about any follow on support for energy bills from 1 April.

The benefit of the scheme is applied directly to Great Places and Plumlife’s electricity and gas bills. The actual cost paid by Great Places and Plumlife is used to calculate service charges and heat tariffs – this means the discount is applied. Without the discount from the scheme the service charges and heat tariffs would be higher.

You do not need to do anything as the discount is automatically taken into account in your service charges and bills.

If you are part of a heat network and you are billed via your service charges you will receive the discount in the same way. The scheme reduces the cost of the gas that we purchase and consume to provide heat for you, the discounted costs will be applied to your services charges as normal. We don’t make any profit from the heat network. 

For heat provided on a metered network, Great Places has not increased tariffs in line with the higher energy costs in the market.

The tariffs for electricity charged by Great Places pre-payment card meters are lower than the cost of that electricity to us even with the discount applied. Electricity tariffs have not increased in line with market prices. For that reason, the benefit of the scheme will not be passed onto customers.

If you’re unhappy about how the discount has been applied, or you think you should have received a discount, contact us using Chatabot or our online form.

If you’re still unhappy with the discount passed on to you, and you have reason to believe that the Energy Bill Relief Scheme Pass-through Requirement (Heat Suppliers (England and Wales and Scotland)) Regulations 2022 have not been met, you can raise a complaint with the Energy Ombudsman.

Under the Energy Prices Act 2022, you can take up the recovery of the pass-through amount to which you are entitled as a civil debt if you have not received it by the time you get your next bill.