The Most Expensive Tariff You Never Signed Up For
There’s a question we ask every business owner we meet. When did your energy contract end?
Most people can’t answer it. And that one unknown date is quietly costing North East businesses thousands of pounds a year.
When a fixed business energy contract expires and nothing new gets signed, you don’t stay on your old rate. You get moved onto something called a deemed rate. It happens automatically. There’s no agreement, no negotiation and no signature. The supplier simply deems you to be their customer, and the supplier picks the price. It’s usually among the most expensive tariffs they offer.
There’s no penalty for the supplier when this happens, no rule that says they have to warn you in plain English, and no reason for them to move you off it. Every month you stay put is profit for them.
Timing makes this worse than usual right now. Energy prices have fallen a long way from where they were in 2022 and 2023, but only for businesses that went back and renegotiated. Industry figures from early this year show the smallest businesses paying around 45% more per unit than the average, and most of that gap comes down to contracts. The businesses that re-signed caught the falling prices. The ones sitting on rolled over or out of contract terms didn’t. The market moved. Their bills never did.
So who ends up in this position? Not careless owners. Busy ones. The café owner whose renewal letter arrived in the school holidays. The salon owner who moved premises and inherited a supplier. The care home manager with far more urgent things to deal with. If your business runs fridges, cellar cooling, dryers or heating that can never be switched off, you can’t simply use less energy. The rate you pay per unit is the only lever you have, and it’s the one nobody ever checks. Your accountant handles the tax. Your broker handles the insurance. The energy bill just gets paid.
We think checking it should take no effort at all, so we’ve built our audit that way. You send us one photo of your energy bill and that’s the whole job done. We check your rates against today’s market for free and tell you what we find. No meetings, no sales pitch, no obligation. If your bill is fine we’ll say so. On average, we find that 22% of utility overheads don’t need to be there.
When Jalf Ali, who owns Khai Khai in Newcastle, sent us his bill, it turned out even one of the city’s busiest kitchens was overpaying. His audit started with one photo. Yours can too.
📸 Send a photo of your bill to hello@smecofe.com and we’ll do the rest. Worst case? You spend ten seconds finding out your bill is fine.