Who Runs Britain's Energy Suppliers: 7 CEOs Ranked

The short version

Every supplier sells the same product: electricity and gas. What rarely gets reported is the culture running underneath it, and the person setting the tone. Most customers never think about who runs their energy supplier, yet leadership style is a real signal of how a company treats customers, staff and money, not just colour for a profile piece.

SwitchInsights checked the current leaders of seven UK suppliers against something checkable: Ofgem and Citizens Advice ratings, Trustpilot and Glassdoor scores, and regulatory record. The picture that emerges rarely matches the press release, and sometimes does not even agree with itself.

Fuse Energy: Alan Chang

Alan Chang was Revolut's third employee, later its Chief Revenue Officer, before co-founding Fuse, originally Tesseract Energy, with Charles Orr in 2022. Fuse has raised over 100 million dollars across Balderton, Lowercarbon, Accel, Lakestar and Ribbit, with some reports valuing it toward 5 billion dollars. It supplies electricity and gas through an app only, with no phone support and no prepayment option.

His own blog states: "I am direct, no BS. I am no longer motivated by money." A Times profile reported he skips books for AI summaries, does not watch films, and drives a yellow Lamborghini Urus. He has swapped drinking with friends for the gym, and called charity "an extremely inefficient way to deploy capital."

His revenue claims shift between appearances. One podcast has him citing 2 million dollars, then 20 million, then 400 million across three years; a mid-2025 trade piece cites 90 million; his own June 2026 post claims 165 million for a single quarter and over 300,000 properties. All are self-reported and unaudited.

That last figure sits awkwardly against SwitchInsights' earlier reporting, which found Fuse still under Citizens Advice's 25,000-account threshold in April 2026, too small for the main ranked table. Its Glassdoor culture and values score sits at just 2.9, with one review titled "Great company run by idiots." Which? scored Fuse 3 stars, and found 16% of customers had complained in the past year, above most rivals. No Ofgem enforcement action was found.

Octopus Energy: Greg Jackson

Greg Jackson founded Octopus Energy and remains its chief executive, now serving around 14 million UK accounts. He also retains a stake in Kraken Technologies, the software platform Octopus spun out in 2026 at a reported 8.65 billion dollar valuation. Jackson was made a CBE in 2024 and is a frequent, combative voice on energy policy.

He said in July 2025 that a government official had described lobbying against Octopus's zonal pricing push as "the most aggressive lobbying campaign he had ever seen." After Ofgem ordered Octopus to pay £1.483 million in redress that same month, over 34,000 prepayment customers who did not get final bills on time, Octopus publicly called the underlying billing rules impossible instead of accepting the finding quietly. Citizens Advice rated Octopus 3.67 out of 5 for January to March 2026, the best score of any traditional supplier here.

The 95% Glassdoor approval score remains the highest recorded for any leader profiled here.

British Gas: Chris O'Shea

Chris O'Shea has been group chief executive of Centrica, British Gas's parent, since 2020. No named managing director has run the British Gas retail brand since the last one departed in October 2025. That leaves O'Shea as its public face at group level.

His style is measured, not combative. After Ofgem closed a multi-year investigation into forced prepayment meter installation in May 2026, covering February 2018 to February 2023, O'Shea said plainly: "What happened should never have happened, and I am sorry." British Gas agreed to pay £20 million into the industry's Voluntary Redress Fund and write off up to £70 million of debt for vulnerable customers.

Centrica disclosed his total pay for 2025 at £4.731 million, a 71-to-1 ratio against the average employee, passed despite profit nearly halving to £814 million and roughly 40% of shareholders voting against the pay policy. Citizens Advice rated British Gas just 2.61 out of 5 for January to March 2026, the lowest score in this piece. Its Glassdoor worst-rated category is senior management, at 2.8.

EDF Energy UK: Simone Rossi

Simone Rossi has led EDF Energy UK since 2017 and sits on EDF Group's executive committee. He is unusually willing among traditional utility executives to court public argument, reportedly telling one interviewer the UK should stop building new wind farms and focus on raising demand instead, a contrarian stance inside a government pushing renewables expansion. On Sizewell C, he has framed EDF's nuclear investment as backing Britain's energy security directly.

Citizens Advice rated EDF just 2.90 out of 5 and ranked it 11th for January to March 2026, continuing a pattern first flagged in 2024, when Citizens Advice named EDF among the worst suppliers for customer service. Trustpilot tells a different story, and Glassdoor's 4.1 may include EDF's wider nuclear workforce, not just retail supply. EDF did not win a category at the 2026 Uswitch Energy Awards.

E.ON Next and OVO: Chris Norbury and Chris Houghton

These two suppliers are not yet one company. E.ON agreed in May 2026 to acquire OVO's retail arm, but the deal remains under Competition and Markets Authority review, with a Phase 1 decision due by 28 October 2026. Until then, both keep separate leadership.

Chris Norbury has run E.ON Next since June 2023, framing the deal as extending the company's reach toward customers: "For decades the UK energy system focused too much on those upstream." Chris Houghton returned to lead OVO's retail business in November 2025, having previously run it from 2014 to 2018. Neither has a substantial public profile beyond company statements.

E.ON Next's Citizens Advice rating easily beats OVO's, consistent with the wider pattern in this piece. Glassdoor is starker still: barely half of OVO's own staff approve of Houghton. OVO also carries the heaviest repeat-enforcement record here, five separate Ofgem redress payments since 2020, most recently £2.77 million in January 2026 over late Warm Home Discount payments to over 11,000 customers. E.ON Next has one recent settlement of its own, £14.5 million in November 2024, for failing to send final bills to around 100,000 former prepayment customers.

ScottishPower: Keith Anderson and Andrew Ward

Keith Anderson runs the whole ScottishPower group, including generation and networks, and is a visible public figure, sitting on the government's Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and pushing back on zonal pricing proposals at industry conferences. The retail business customers deal with is run by Andrew Ward, a company veteran of more than 30 years. His only substantial public appearance found was testimony to a parliamentary committee in October 2025, where he admitted the industry is "just tinkering around the edges" on standing charges.

Citizens Advice rated ScottishPower 2.94 out of 5 for January to March 2026, with complaints handling scoring just 1.5 even as contactability scored better. Glassdoor rates the company 3.9, with 88% approving of Anderson specifically, not Ward. The regulatory history is heavy: £18 million in 2016 over IT failures, a 2022 order over mishandled debt-repayment plans, and £1.5 million more in 2024 for overcharging above the price cap.

Utility Warehouse: Stuart Burnett

Stuart Burnett became sole chief executive of parent company Telecom Plus in August 2024, after two years as co-chief executive. Utility Warehouse is structurally different from every other supplier here, bundling energy with mobile, broadband and insurance and selling through roughly 80,000 self-employed Partners instead of conventional marketing. Burnett's public profile is almost entirely investor-facing, built from results calls and AGM statements, telling shareholders the plan is to "more than double our multiservice customer base to over 1 million customers by FY31."

At the August 2026 AGM, close to 30% of shareholders voted against both the pay report and the new pay policy. Citizens Advice's rating has swung sharply between quarters, from a company-announced "best in the market" claim in late 2024 to roughly 2.45 and 14th place by January to March 2026, a gap worth treating with caution.

The pattern underneath

Nearly every supplier here shows a consistent gap between its Trustpilot score, built on self-selected reviews clustered around switching, and its Citizens Advice rating, built on regulator-tracked, ongoing service data. That gap is consistent enough to be a standing rule: check the Citizens Advice figure, not the review site.

Leadership style tracks something real too. Chang's numbers move between appearances the way ambition usually outruns audited accounts, Jackson's combativeness sits over an unusually strong independent record, and O'Shea's contrition sits over the heaviest enforcement history here. OVO's repeat fines under two different owners suggest the underlying problem has outlived any single chief executive.

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