Always on
This project successfully funded on 26th July 2024, you can still support them with a donation.
The Regulator Guy - Regulating the UK Regulators
Chatham, Medway, United Kingdom
Aim: Setting up an organisation that keeps our regulators in-line and addresses public consultations on behalf of the ordinary person.
The Goal
The aim of The Regulator Guy, and UK Consumer Champions Ltd (the actual company name) is two-fold.
The first goal is to is to bombard our regulators into making decisions that actually help people rather than increasing profits for companies in the naive hope that these companies will make decisions that will help customers. I mainly focus on Ofgem, but have dabbled in consultations from Ofcom and I've spoken to Ofwat a time or two. Every decision made by Ofgem is actually open to multiple stages of public consultation, the problem is that these consultations are often dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of pages long and filled with industry jargon, and honestly isn't worth the effort for most people to read. For example, the decision to increase energy supplier profits in 2023 had over 400 pages of consultation documentation, dozens of questions over a 12 month period and resulted in a £10 per year increase in consumer bills. Realistically, who is going to both with that? Well that's where I come in, I do the hard part, I read all the jargon and then I create simple, quick videos explaining these consultations in layman terms. Not only that, I also write a response and present to my followers for them to send to Ofgem if they agree with my views (and if they don't then I promote them editing my responses and replying anyway!). This means we can get thousands of people to engage in consultations without all of them having to spend countless hours reading jargon-heavy consultations. I want to continue and expand this work as much as possible, so that the public truly can get involved with these public consultations.
The second aim of this enterprise is, rather than helping the public at large, is to help individuals with their bills. I've made a decent start to this, promoting price comparison services to thousands of people who have saved £100,000's on their bills in total. I'm also building a database of customer renewal dates, so I can help people find great deals at a time when they actually need them and I'm offering 1-to-1 conversations to discuss peoples bills and see if there is anything we can do to bring them down. I'd ideally like to hire a few people to help me do this. I never charge people a penny for the services I do, and I keep no bank records at all, I've started building revenue streams through affiliate partnerships with the price comparison services I use (currently Uswitch and Free Price Compare).
The one-year goal is to get this business to have enough of a following that we do not need to rely on crowd-sourced funding and that I can take a salary. The three-year goal would be to build a team, a couple of industry experts to assist on the consultation side, and a couple of advisors to help individuals manage their bills and bring down their costs.
The funding from this crowdfunding project will be used for short-term cashflow to get through to winter 2025, when switching numbers pick up. Switching revenue was low in 2024 as the partnerships weren't working until September 2024 and my following was low. I've spent the last year building my following and expect an upturn in revenue throughout autumn and winter of 2025. This crowdfunder will close at the end of October 2025.
About Me
I guess my story starts in 2019. I started a business called Over50smoney in 2019 with the CEO of the company I worked for from 2015-2019. During my time with Over50smoney, I started a petition against Ofgem to change the way the price cap calculated profits for suppliers, it calculated profits as a percentage of the other costs added together, which meant that as the crisis worsened, energy suppliers were actually becoming more profitable (as we've all seen). This petition reached over 350,000 signatures and was handed in to 10 Downing Street in July 2023 (I'm the guy writing on the box in the picture below, the elder gentleman was my business partner and behind me is my ever-supportive little sister).
I've been actively campaigning against many of Ofgem's decisions since the beginning of the energy crisis and I've been involved in dozens of Ofgem consultations over the last four years, always giving a voice to consumers and calling for Ofgem to bring our bills down. (Most of my content is on the over50smoney website and youtube channel, but the newer stuff is on theregulatorguy.co.uk and the regulator guy youtube channel).
I became so involved in my energy campaigning work that I felt my attention divert away from Over50smoney, so at the end of March 2024 I decided to leave Over50smoney and become The Regulator Guy full time.
Not being distracted with running another website was supposed to allow me more time to focus on energy regulation consultations and expand further into the remits of Ofcom and Ofwat, but it hasn't quite worked out that way. The fatal flaw with my plan is that I haven't focused on funding, which means I've inevitably wound up focusing on work that pays rather than focusing solely on regulatory and governmental consultations as planned.
So, I've created UK Consumer Champions Limited (couldn't use "the regulator guy" as a business name because it has the word "regulator" in it) and I'm fundraising to fund this business whilst I build alternative revenue streams. Initially, it'll just be me in this business, but as funds come in I will look to expand the company and take on more experts in each field to help guide our regulators toward making the right decisions for consumer finances.
Any support anyone offers would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions or want to talk to me about specifc consultations we should be getting involved with, please email me on [email protected].