THE SHOWROOM has closed. Customers wait ages for their phone calls to be answered. And even those with a service contract for their central heating get left in the cold.

That's the flaming mess of British Gas - as customer complaints more than doubled last year to record levels.

And the rocketing level of dissatisfaction goes right across the board - over bills that are wrong, about poor service and repair work and ineffective emergency cover.

This is the sorry story revealed by the damning report of the watchdog Gas Consumers' Council as nationwide complaints about British Gas soared by 102 per cent, with pattern of customer anger and frustration in our region almost exactly matching this shameful record.

But what's gone wrong?

In a word, privatisation.

For, through it, the old emphasis on customer service was pushed by the company's profit-driven ethos on to the remotest of back-burners.

And in the restructuring of the business, the bosses - the ones whose pay awards made the expression "fat cats" a byword for unrestrained executive greed - quite simply sacked too many employees.

They are the reasons for the phones that ring for ages, the tarnished three-star heating contracts that left households in the cold and why customers can no longer pay their bill at the showroom - if it is still there.

True, a shamed British Gas has got the message. For now the watchdog tells us that recent indications are that consumers will be paid the attention they deserve.

This does not, however, mitigate the fact that standards were allowed to slip in the first place through privatisation - even with the existence of a watchdog which was supposed to keep them intact.

The best watchdog for all the utilities is, as we have stressed ever since the error of the privatised monopolies was foisted on consumers, is proper competition. British Gas would not have dared to treat customers so shabbily if they were able to flee to a rival company.

And, yes, this is beginning to happen in the gas industry so that, by 1998, the whole country will be opened up to competition. But, meantime, the corporate fat cats and shareholders have had the cream and the customers have been served an expensive whey.

That should never have been allowed.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.