"We pay Royal Mail a fair and reflective price to cover the rural areas, which takes out any opportunity for cherry-picking," said Nick Wells, the chief executive of Whistl.
In a letter sent alongside its response to the consultation, CMA senior director John Kirkpatrick said: "We believe that consumers and the economy would be best served by a model that promotes wide access to Land Registry data at cost-reflective prices, encouraging its use and commercial exploitation by a range of individuals and businesses".
Momentum is growing for transitioning residential consumers toward more 'cost-reflective' pricing that better reflects the true costs of generation and supply, and sends a 'price signal' that presumably incentivises reduced consumption during peak periods.
Because the costs of FiTs are typically passed through to consumers via higher electricity prices or taxes, FiTs can quickly become unsustainable when set well above the cost-reflective price of fossil-based power generation.
In this paper, we apply insights from psychology and behavioural economics to identify how cost-reflective pricing can be designed, depicted and delivered to enhance customer uptake and optimal usage –thereby facilitating 'appropriate' demand response – for a larger cross-section of the population.
The lack of demand-side response, short-term reliability management procedures and non-market ancillary services provision often undermine market reflective scarcity pricing and distort long-term investment incentives.
Taking market-based or cost-reflective imbalance prices as the main objective, it is advised that: (1) the imbalance settlement should not contain penalties or power exchange prices, (2) capacity payments should be allocated to imbalanced BRPs via an additive component in the imbalance price and (3) a cap should be imposed on the amount of reserves.
"The hotel price is reflective of the cost of your trip," she explained, highlighting that if hotel prices are inflated, airfare and attraction prices will likely be expensive, too.
For vegetarians, many will have heard of Terre a Terre (East St), where the food is gourmet, booking essential and prices reflective of its reputation.
The two leading debt-rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service, said yesterday that they were considering changing the way they determine their ratings to make them more timely and reflective of market prices and sentiment.
"Interchange fees are not reflective of gas prices," said a spokeswoman for MasterCard.
