Three Northern Ireland electricity providers forced to hire extra staff to deal with influx of calls from customers amid cost-of-living crisis, says Consumer Council director

Three electricity providers in Northern Ireland have been forced to hire extra staff to deal with an influx of calls from consumers during the cost-of-living crisis, it has emerged.

The Northern Ireland Consumer Council had raised the problem of customers being unable to contact their providers in recent weeks, according to the council's director of infrastructure and sustainability.

Peter McClenaghan, speaking to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster during an evidence session on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, told MPs some customers had contacted his organisation directly after trying and failing to get through to their electricity provider.

He had been responding to a query from the committee chair, Tory MP Simon Hoare, who said: "I haven't detected anybody talking about the increasing of resilience in customer service handling calls by the energy providers, because clearly there's going to be huge demand from people saying 'I want to pay, I'm having difficulty paying, can I have staged payments' or whatever it may happen to be'.

"If you're short of money, hanging on the telephone for an hour-and-a-half waiting to get through to somebody is just going to add insult to injury."

Mr McClenaghan said: "We are finding a signiicant uplift in the number of calls that are coming through to our support line, and a lot of those calls in relation to energy are actually from people who are finding that they can't get through to the energy companies. They phone the Consumer Council and say 'I'm having problems getting through to my energy company'.

"That's something we have spoken to the companies about in the past weeks. Three of the largest electricity providers in Northern Ireland have brought on significant numbers of extra staff to deal with calls."

His organisation has in recent months urged consumers to consider switching providers to try and lower their monthly energy bills.

In October, Mr McClenaghan said: “some energy suppliers’ prices will still be much higher than others, so we are encouraging consumers to think about switching supplier or tariff as some households could make savings of over £500.

“To take the hassle out of switching, the Consumer Council’s free online Energy Price Comparison Tool on its website, lets consumers see all available tariffs from all suppliers in one place.”