New figures uncovered by Labour suggest that British households could have been overcharged by over £3.8 billion by Britain’s big six electricity suppliers in the last three years.

The figures suggest that all of the six major suppliers, who supply 98 per cent of homes in Britain, have been buying wholesale electricity at above the market price.

Caroline Flint MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, said:

“These figures reveal the full extent of the way consumers have been overcharged for their electricity. Energy companies always blame wholesale costs when they put up bills, but it now looks like they’ve deliberately inflated prices to boost profits from their power stations. The regulator Ofgem has serious questions to answer about why it has failed to monitor the way in which companies have bought electricity from themselves and why it has allowed these companies to overcharge their customers.

“The time has come for a complete overhaul of our energy market. Labour will break up the big energy companies, put an end to the secret deals and force them to do all of their trading on the open market. And until these reforms kick-in, we will put a stop to unfair price rises by freezing energy bills until 2017.”