There is something terribly wrong with today's news that Npower has been fined £2 million for the way they mishandled complaints.
The figure of £2 million is, of course, chicken feed to a company the size of Npower, whose revenues in 2010 were just short of £8 billion (yes, that's billion with a "b").
But that's not the point.
The point is that fining a large publicly listed company does not bring about proper accountability. Who loses when a company like this is fined £2 million? The shareholders. And who are the shareholders? Er, that would be people like you and me, who no doubt have bits of our pension funds invested in companies like Npower.
Was it the shareholders who were responsible for failing to treat customer complaints properly?
No. That would be the company's board of directors.
The directors of a company are legally responsible for the actions of that company. It's not clear to me whether action against the directors personally would have been an option in this case from a legal point of view. But taking action against the directors personally would be far more likely to result in proper accountability, and if the law doesn't allow it in cases like this, the law should be changed. If the law does allow it in cases like this, then shame on Ofgem for not having the balls to take the action they should have done.
Company directors may be minded to cut corners and do bad things like failing to treat customer complaints honestly if they know that the worst that will happen is that their company gets fined.
I wonder if Npower would have mishandled the complaints in the way it did if the directors thought that they could be personally fined £2 million if they got caught?