The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The gap between the best and worst utility companies is wider than it's ever been according to the latest Citizens Advice statistics.

Independent utilities supplier Extra Energy received eighty times more complaints than the best bix six supplier, SSE for the period between April and June.

Extra Energy received 1,791 complaints per 100,000 customers, which was even worse than its  of 1,682 complaints in the previous quarter.

SSE improved its service dropping to just over 22 complaints.

Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: "The latest league table shows some suppliers are getting much better at sorting out their customers' problems, but it's disappointing to see others getting worse at dealing with complaints."

Co-Operative Energy and Scottish Power, also received more complaints than in the previous three-month period.making them the second and third worst in the league tables.

Co-Operative Energy had a ratio of 850 complaints, up from 819, and Scottish Power had more than 571, up from 558.

Extra Energy, which launched in 2014, apologised to customers and said it was now dealing with more complaints by the end of the next working day.

Ben Jones, the firm's managing director of operations, said: "These figures reflect historic customer service issues that occurred during a period of time where Extra Energy saw our number of customers expand rapidly and unfortunately some of these complaints have taken longer than expected to resolve.

"We apologise unreservedly to anyone who has not received the standard of service we expect of ourselves."