Thousands of customers were given an “unacceptable service” following Storm Arwen, the UK energy watchdog has found.

The storm hit the country back in November, leaving nearly one million homes without power and about 4,000 having to cope in “appalling conditions” for more than a week.

Ofgem launched a six-month review into how the industry handled the situation and has now published its findings.

It has ruled that some affected customers were left without any power for “an unacceptable amount of time, received poor communication from their network operator and compensation payments took too long”.

However, it also found that distribution network companies (DNOs) did initiate their emergency plans before the storm hit, but these were “not sufficient” to deal with the scale of damage that was caused.

Northern Powergrid was named as one of those companies, with Ofgem finding it failed to carry out all of its duties under its own planned winter preparedness campaign.

The company failed to directly contact vulnerable customers, who were due to receive additional support during a power cut, and its call centre “fell below” the expected standards.

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