News

GUERNSEY Electricity has again recorded a near perfect record in its service standards and world-beating reliability.

Out of nearly 21,000 events covered under the company’s guaranteed service standards, it missed the required performance on just five occasions.

And the average time that customers were without supply, the key industry measure of reliability, was just 37 minutes. This compares to latest figure of 100 minutes for Great Britain (2006/7 Source Ofgem).

Guernsey Electricity managing director Ian Watson said that customer service and reliability were key priorities for the company.

‘Our guaranteed standards set stringent criteria for performance, which assures our customers of a high level of service, and we have fallen short of our own high targets just five times. The credit for that has to go to our staff, as it goes to show what an excellent job they are doing and the excellent level of service that our customers can expect,’ he said.

‘As far as reliability is concerned, in an ideal world we would not have any supply failures, What we can do is try to ensure these are kept to a minimum, and we do that by investing in the network to improve resilience and reduce the potential for faults. As a result, islanders are continuing to enjoy one of the most reliable electricity supplies in the world.’

More than a third of the supply time lost was the result of just two incidents, the first at Cobo and the other at Admiral Park. The latter of these was caused by damage to an underground power cable by another contractor. Mr Watson said illustrated the difficulty that local utility companies faced.

The company’s guaranteed standards mirror the performance criteria set by OFGEM, which regulates electricity suppliers in the UK. They include keeping appointments on time, rectifying faults and responding to requests and enquiries.

Customers are eligible for compensation if the company does not met the agreed level of service.

The instances where Guernsey Electricity missed its standards were three late appointments, out of more than 9,500, and one service fuse fault that was not repaired within three hours. The company also failed once to provide an estimate within the guaranteed 5 day response time.

As well as its guaranteed standards, Guernsey Electricity also has a number of other performance standards that set out other criteria for customer service. More than 40,000 separate events were covered under these in the last financial year, and the company met all the agreed targets with a 99.8% record overall.

The figures will be included in the companies annual report for the 12 months to 31 March 2008, which is published later this month.