By Daniel Hunter

Ethical energy provider, Co-operative Energy, has announced that it is putting customers before profits and is reducing its prices.

The average 4.5% price increase, which Co-operative Energy announced on 18 October, has now been cut by 2% to 2.5%. The move is driven by Co-operative Energy's pledge to provide customers with a fair and transparent deal, and is in response to the clear indication that the Government has given that it will remove the mandatory Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) green taxes on gas and electricity bills.

Ramsay Dunning, group general manager at Co-operative Energy said: "As we stated in our recent price increase announcement, there were a number of factors that were out of our control including costs associated with buying energy and getting it into people's homes, that we reluctantly had to pass on to our customers by raising prices.

"However, given the expectation that an announcement is imminent that the burden of green and social taxes will be removed by the Government we have decided to take a leap of faith and remove this element, which represents 2%, from our previously announced average 4.5% price increase. This reduces our proposed average increase to 2.5%.

"In fact over half of our customers will see no increase in their tariffs as a result of our decision to absorb a portion of the increased costs we face.

"If ultimately we have misread the signals and social taxes remain in place for next year we will have no alternative but to review this decision but at least our customers will have benefited over the difficult winter months.

"This decision is consistent with Co-operative Energy's pledge to offer fair, transparent and cost reflective pricing and to make decisions that benefit the customer at the earliest opportunity.

"We're not answerable to shareholders; we're answerable to our customers who are our members. We know these are very tough times for everyone so we are doing what we can to support our customers. Hopefully this will be welcome news in the run up to Christmas and throughout the winter months."

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