Written by Beccy Wardle, Chief Executive Officer

Last week, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report that should give anyone working in our sector pause for thought. Its conclusion, in essence, is that Ofwat, Ofgem and Ofcom cannot currently be confident that support for people struggling with their water, energy and broadband bills is reaching those who need it most.

That’s not really a criticism of the regulators themselves. It’s a verdict on how the whole system is designed, and on how much weight it puts on the person in difficulty to find their own way through it. As the Committee’s chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, put it: “There is nothing unavoidable about energy, water and broadband consumers being allowed to drift into debt through poor communication and coordination.”

The gap is real, and it isn’t going to close on its own

Consumer debt to water and energy companies alone stood at £7.2 billion by March 2025, and energy debt has risen by 118% in real terms since 2021. Only around 6% of water customers are on a social tariff, and fewer than 9% of eligible broadband customers are. Awareness is a big part of the problem too: just 34% of eligible broadband customers, and only 39% of water customers who need help, know they can even ask for it. Water customers have it worse in one respect and better in another: Ofwat estimates that around half of households could be eligible for extra support through its Priority Services Register, yet no equivalent register exists in broadband at all

Those figures alone would be reason enough to act. But what worries me more is the ever increasing need. Demand for this kind of support isn’t going to ease off, and we must not plan as though it will. The cost of essentials, the pace of welfare reform and an ageing population are all adding to the number of people who need help. In addition, energy markets remain exposed to geopolitical shocks in a way we’ve all had to learn to live with since 2022. This volatility will always land hardest on people who already have the least ability to absorb it. Every part of this points the same way: more people needing support, not fewer, for years to come.

One struggle rarely exists alone

Here’s what our experience at Auriga tells us: we work alongside energy and water partners every day with people in genuine financial difficulty, and it is vanishingly rare for someone to come to us with a single, isolated problem.

When we support someone carrying a high level of water debt, that debt is very rarely the whole story. More often than not, it’s a signal of something broader: energy arrears too, mounting unsecured debt, and frequently something else underneath it all, whether that’s a physical health condition, a disability, or a mental health difficulty that’s making it harder to keep on top of everything at once. The Committee’s report echoes this. It found no comprehensive view, anywhere in the system, of what a single household owes across sectors, and no way for someone who has already disclosed their circumstances to one company to avoid repeating that disclosure, and the stress that comes along with that, to the next.

What “no wrong door” could mean here

Before I led Auriga Services, an organisation focused on financial inclusion, I spent years working in the health and mental health charity sector, and alongside NHS colleagues. One idea from that world has always stayed with me: “no wrong door.” It’s the principle that a person shouldn’t have to find precisely the right service, through precisely the right entry point, before anyone will help them. Wherever they turn up, whoever they first tell their story to, that should be enough to start the right support moving, even if it isn’t that service’s job to deliver all of it. Within my previous work, putting this idea into practice was really driven by people with their own lived experience of needing support, and crucially not always getting it. When “no wrong door” is put into practice, it has a real impact on creating better outcomes for people.

Health and social care have spent years, and no small amount of money, learning how to join up around a person instead of a system. Water, energy and broadband are, in effect, trying to solve the same problem from a standing start. I think it is incumbent upon our sector to be genuinely curious about what we could borrow from that experience, rather than treating this as a problem only regulators and utility companies can solve between them.

The honest risk in the obvious answer

The Committee’s central recommendation is a “tell us once” approach: shared eligibility data across sectors, so a household that has already told one company about their circumstances doesn’t have to prove it all over again to the next. I understand the appeal, and it deserves serious testing. But it deserves serious scrutiny too. A shared register of financially vulnerable households is also a single point of failure if consent, governance or security aren’t right from day one, and it risks deterring exactly the people it’s meant to help, many of whom are already wary of sharing personal information with any organisation. Again, this is something that we grappled with frequently when implementing a “no wrong door” model within mental health. Who governs access? Who audits it? What happens when someone wants their data removed? These aren’t details to sort out after the fact. They need to be built into the model from the start, alongside the design of the support itself.

Working inside affordability schemes

The next step should not be another round of position papers. It should be a live pilot, run across two sectors to begin with, that tests whether a joined-up approach actually gets more eligible people the support they’re entitled to, not just whether the mechanism can be built. Success should be measured in people helped, not in registers created.

Auriga works at exactly this intersection already, inside real affordability schemes, with real partners, every day. We’d welcome the chance to help design and test a model like this properly: consent-led, privacy-conscious from the outset, and judged by outcomes rather than intentions.

The Committee has told us the current system isn’t confident it’s reaching people. Let’s not just agree with that finding. Let’s go and test a better one. Who else is ready for action?