Make Claims

About

Make Claims exists because most people who sit through a long power cut never hear that they are owed money, and the few who do are often told to ask the wrong company.

Who runs it

Brent Burgess, in a personal capacity. Questions and corrections: hello@makeclaims.co.uk.

The site is independent. It is not Ofgem, a network operator, a supplier, Citizens Advice or the Energy Ombudsman, and none of them endorse it. It is not a claims company and is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, nor does it need to be: it handles no claims. It charges nothing, takes no fee or commission from anyone when you claim, carries no advertising, and never submits anything on your behalf. It tells you what the published rules say and where to ask; the operator decides what is paid.

How the counting works

Every ten minutes the site reads the open power-cut feeds published by four of Great Britain's six electricity network operators. For each fault it keeps the operator's reference, the time the operator logged it, the postcodes affected and the number of customers off. Hours are counted from the logged time to the latest reading of the feed, or to the restoration time where the operator publishes one. When a fault disappears from a feed without a restoration time, the site marks it restored at about the time it vanished and says so.

The sums shown are the Ofgem standards that applied from 1 April 2026, applied to those hours. Because the operator decides whether a day counted as severe weather, the site shows the figure under each rule rather than guessing.

What it cannot know

  • Whether your own home was off for the whole time. A fault record covers an area; some homes come back sooner.
  • Whether the operator will class the event as severe weather, or treat it as an exception.
  • Cuts affecting five or fewer customers, which the feeds leave out, and cuts on independent operators' networks.
  • Which postcodes an Electricity North West cut affects: its feed gives a point on a map instead, so its cuts are named after the nearest postcode district and the postcode check cannot find them. Nor how many customers an SP Energy Networks cut affects, which its feed does not say.
  • Records that stay open for weeks are shown with a warning and left out of the counts; they are usually repair jobs rather than continuous time off supply.
  • What happens while an operator's feed cannot be read. The site stops counting that operator's hours at its last good reading, so a cut cannot pass a line on old data, and the right-now page says so until the feed can be read again.

Data sources and licences

The rules come from Ofgem and the legislation, checked on ; the sources are on the rules page. The site's own files under /data/ may be reused with a link back, keeping the operators' attributions.

How it is built

Static pages, prebuilt and served from a content delivery network, with one small script for the postcode check. No accounts, no cookies, no tracking of individuals; see the privacy page. It runs on free services and open-source tools so that it can keep running at no cost.