14.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to rigorously ensure full implementation of the Third Energy Package, and calls for its revision in the form of a new Energy Market Design to take account of the following recommendations in relation to domestic consumers: (a) recommends improving the frequency of energy bills and the transparency and clarity of both bills and contracts in order to aid interpretability and comparison; insists that clear language must be used, avoiding technical terms; requests the Commission to identify minimum information requirements in this respect, including best practices; stresses that both fixed charges and taxes and levies should be clearly identified as such in the bills, allowing the customer to distinguish them easily from the variable, consumption-related cost; recalls existing requirements for suppliers to specify in or with bills the contribution of each energy source to the overall fuel mix of the supplier over the preceding year in a comprehensible and clearly comparable manner, including a reference to where information can be found on the environmental impact in terms of CO2 emissions and radioactive waste; (b) recommends creating a one-stop shop to provide all relevant information enabling consumers to make an informed decision; (c) recommends that distribution system operators, given that they have access to a household’s historical consumption, as well as operators of independent comparison tools, work together with energy regulators to examine how best they can proactively provide consumers with comparisons of offers in order to enable all consumers, even those without internet access or skills, to find out whether they could save money by switching; (d) recommends developing guidelines for price comparison tools to ensure that consumers can access independent, up-to-date and understandable comparison tools; believes Member States should consider developing accreditation schemes covering all price comparison tools, in line with CEER guidelines; (e) recommends the creation of new platforms to serve as independent Price Comparison Tools (PCTs) to provide greater clarity to consumers on billing; recommends that such independent platforms provide consumers with information on the percentage share of energy sources used and the different taxes, levies and add-ons contained in energy tariffs in a comparable way to empower the consumer to easily seek more suitable offers in terms of price, quality and sustainability; suggests that this role could be assumed by existing bodies such as national energy departments, regulators or consumer organisations; recommends the development of at least one such independent price comparison tool per Member State; (f) recommends, in order to enhance retail competition between suppliers, that guidelines be developed by Member States, in consultation with operators of price comparison tools and consumer groups, to ensure that the design by suppliers of different tariffs allows for simple comparisons, avoiding consumer confusion; (g) recommends that consumers should be notified in or alongside energy bills about the most suitable and advantageous tariff for them, based on historic consumption patterns, and that it should be possible for consumers to move to that tariff, if they so wish, in the simplest way possible; notes, given that switching rates are low in many Member States, that many households, especially the most vulnerable, are not engaged in the energy market and are stuck on inappropriate, outdated and expensive tariffs; (h) recommends investigating measures to enable retail prices to better reflect wholesale prices and thus reverse the trend of an increasing proportion of fixed elements in energy bills, in particular taxes and levies and in some cases network charges; highlights the discrepancy between levels of levies and taxes paid by household and industry consumers;