[/caption]British Gas have canceled their annual conference. This may well have been an excellent opportunity to hear BGB extolling their Smart meter successes, or reassuring businesses that slashing more than £100 million out of back Office Staff wouldn’t impact on Service Levels.

Businesses were probably as keen to try and understand how BGB’s current focus on increasing the value extracted from Business users would sit with a professed intention to offer high levels of service to SME groups.

Our business energy supply and services segment is performing well. Our focus continues to be on the SME market and on higher value Industrial and Commercial customers, where we are able to offer high levels of service to multi-site organisations and other accounts requiring more sophisticated solutions. Improvements in operational performance, strong renewals and higher than expected demand for energy as a result of the cold weather, have enabled us to deliver further improvements in margin. We again expect to be able to deliver strong year on year profit growth in this business.
– Centrica Interim Management Statement

Hopefully this won’t translate into higher procurement costs for Electricity and gas contracts, and reduced support levels for the rest of us remaining 2nd Class users. How can you cut a further £100 million out of a back office that was struggling to deliver service anyway; it was not so long ago that Energywatch (as was then) condemned BGB for the worst customer service, which was to be resolved by thousands of redundancies and moving some Customer Services areas to Indian call centres, that said more recent research suggests the BGB is now relatively better than the rest of the Big Six.

Well, maybe all is not lost the Conference is hopefully going to be rearranged later in the year.