Markets do not correct themselves simply because a problem becomes visible. Correction usually needs an actor with a legal mandate, the evidence to support a claim, and enough independence to make companies and regulators respond. In Great Britain, that actor has held authority in energy and postal services for years, and now argues for extending the model into housing, telecoms, water, and financial services.

Tom Lowe leads the energy networks and systems team at Citizens Advice, the statutory consumer advocate for domestic, small business, and heat network consumers in Great Britain. Sixteen years across energy suppliers, trade associations, regulators, and consumer advocacy inform his argument that a legal mandate, rather than goodwill, is what makes a market answerable to the people it serves.

In this conversation:

• Why a statutory mandate changes how companies and regulators respond to a consumer body, compared with a voluntary or campaigning one
• The fifteen year path from identifying a problem with energy brokers to direct regulation by Ofgem
• The case made in Building Better Markets for extending the model into housing, telecoms, water, and financial services
• How the advocate function is funded through an industry levy, and what protects that funding from becoming a dependency on the sector it holds accountable
• What an EU member state would need in place to replicate the model beyond the United Kingdom

The conversation returns to a question that outlives any single sector: what a market owes the people who cannot easily walk away from it, and who holds the mandate to make sure it delivers.

Energ'Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Reach out to Marine Cornelis via BlueSky or LinkedIn
Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
Edition: Podcast Media Factory

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© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Some of the most consequential facts about an energy system never appear on a policy dashboard: whether an 85-year-old can read her own bill, whether she knows help exists, whether she trusts the voice on the phone enough to answer it.

Nina Campbell, Global Energy Lead at Consumers International, led the Blueprint for Inclusive Energy Services, the report examining a liberalised, choice-based energy market from the perspective of Italians aged 75 and over. Marine co-authored the Blueprint and brings that collaboration into this conversation on trust, exclusion, and who a market is actually built for.

In this episode:
– Why Consumers International moved away from "vulnerable consumer" toward "energy hardship," and what that shift changes about people's willingness to ask for help
– The loyalty premium: why discovering you paid more for staying put damages trust more deeply than a plainly bad deal
– The invisible labour of carers, 16% of Italians in a caregiving role around energy, mostly women over 45, absorbing costs the system doesn't recognise
– How the Blueprint's ten solutions took shape through direct collaboration with suppliers
– What it would take to replicate this method for other consumer groups and other markets

Reference: Blueprint for Inclusive Energy Services, Consumers International. (2026)

Energ'Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

Reach out to Marine Cornelis via BlueSky or LinkedIn
Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
Edition: Podcast Media Factory

Support Energ'Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

EUSEW turns 20. To mark it, Marine Cornelis sits down at the European Sustainable Energy Week with three people who have spent two decades inside EU energy policy: Thomas Nowak (heat pumps and buildings), Dušan Jakovljević (industrial energy efficiency) and Heike Winkler (offshore wind and the North Sea).

The conversation treats EUSEW as a mirror. What it foregrounds, and what it sidelines, tracks whatever the Commission has in vogue, from hydrogen to carbon capture, often at the expense of people, consumers and energy poverty.

What we get into:

• Why a convening that reflects priorities struggles to set them, and how limited slots turn the agenda into a zero-sum game

• Electrification as the efficient core of the system, and the "primary energy fallacy" still used against it

• Re-industrialisation, green hydrogen and jobs, and where a top-down European approach might have moved faster

• The single market's unfinished business, and the real cost of member-state deviations

• Why EUSEW keeps talking to the already-convinced, and how to bring member states and silos into the same room

• Parallel agendas, from the New European Bauhaus to energy poverty and citizen advisory hubs, and the risk of fragmentation

A stocktake of what changed, what was harder than it should have been, and what a fair, socially accepted transition still demands.

Energ'Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

Reach out to Marine Cornelis via BlueSky or LinkedIn
Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
Edition: Podcast Media Factory

Support Energ'Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.