Ofgem's scheme asks suppliers to find eligible households, contact them, apply the rules and evidence every pound written off, against £4.4bn of energy debt and a first phase launching in early 2026. We ran the £9bn Energy Bills Support Scheme to the same standard of scrutiny. We can set yours up to pass it.
Book a confidential conversationPhase one is aimed at around 195,000 households on means tested benefits with more than £100 of debt built up between April 2022 and March 2024. Suppliers must identify them automatically, make contact, secure either a contribution or engagement with a debt advice charity, apply the write off and keep the records that prove it. The money is recovered through the debt allowance on everyone's bills, which is why Ofgem, auditors and the press will look closely at how well it was run. Get the identification logic wrong and you either miss eligible customers or write off debt you were not entitled to.
Eligibility rules turned into data logic and tested against your book, customer journeys for contact and consent, controls and sign off, and the reporting Ofgem will ask for. Built to the standard of a government scheme, because that is what it is.
Every write off traceable to a rule, a customer and a decision, reconciled to the debt allowance recovery, with an audit trail that holds up when someone questions it a year later.
Beyond the scheme: occupier accounts, which suppliers estimate hold between £1.1bn and £1.7bn of the debt, affordability led collections, prepayment safeguards and the new Know your Rights obligations, designed into the operation rather than bolted on.
On the Energy Bills Support Scheme our founder was Project Director, accountable to Ofgem, BEIS and HMRC for the money reaching the right households through the suppliers and for proving it had. The same disciplines, eligibility logic, controls, reconciliation and reporting, are what the debt relief scheme needs at supplier scale. We also know supplier billing and collections systems from the inside, so the scheme lands in the operation rather than in a spreadsheet beside it.
Ofgem expects the first phase to launch in early 2026, with the detailed rules settled through consultation. Suppliers that prepare their eligibility data and evidence trail now will be the ones that run it cleanly; the ones that wait will be reconstructing records after the fact.
Parts of it. Flagging accounts and applying a credit are standard. The eligibility logic across benefit status and debt vintage, the contact and consent journeys, and the evidence and reporting Ofgem will want are usually bespoke, and they are where the risk sits.
Weeks rather than months, provided your customer and debt data is accessible. The eligibility logic is the long pole; everything else follows from getting that right and tested.
Then the most useful thing we can do is an independent review of the eligibility logic and the evidence trail before the first write offs are applied. Correcting a write off after the event is far more painful than checking it before.
We design the customer journeys and the interfaces with them. The charities do the advice; we make sure the handover, the record and the outcome are captured so the scheme rules are met.
It is the first phase of Ofgem's debt relief scheme: an envelope of around £500m to write off energy debt built up between April 2022 and March 2024 by households on means tested benefits, aimed at around 195,000 households with more than £100 of such debt. Ofgem set out the proposal in 2025, and suppliers must find eligible customers, make contact, apply the write off and keep the evidence.
Talk to us before the first write off is applied. A short mobilisation review tells you whether your logic, journeys and evidence will stand up.
Book a confidential conversation