Utility Aid: When buying power works for parish and town councils

Author: Stephanie Steele, partnerships manager at Utility Aid

Utility Aid is proud to sponsor NALC's Star Council Awards 2026/27 Young Councillor of the Year category. We believe young councillors bring fresh ideas, energy and ambition to local communities, helping shape a better future for the people they represent. Their commitment deserves to be recognised and celebrated. At Utility Aid, we share that commitment to strengthening communities and helping organisations make the most of their resources. We're delighted to support NALC in shining a light on the people making a real difference locally and inspiring the next generation of community leaders.

Parish and town councils face a specific challenge in the energy market. Suppliers respond to scale, and a single council (even a large one) is a small customer in the wider picture. The terms they offer reflect that. The council that negotiates alone for its village electricity, its street lighting or its community centre gas is dealing with the same suppliers as national retail chains and industrial estates, but from a position with none of their leverage.

The collective purchasing model exists to change that dynamic. When many lone buyers act as one, suppliers respond with terms they wouldn't offer to any of these buyers individually. The way it works is straightforward: aggregate demand, run a joint tender, and negotiate as a group. Every member benefits from the collective's scale without having to manage the process themselves.

For town and parish councils specifically, this matters more than it does for many other sectors for three reasons:

• Time — Most councils don't have dedicated procurement teams. Energy contracts get renewed by clerks and officers who already have dozens of other responsibilities. Collective purchasing removes negotiation from the council's workload, while still delivering better terms than the council could have secured alone.
• Expertise — Energy markets have become genuinely complex in recent years. Wholesale prices, non-commodity charges, contract structures, compliance obligations – these are specialist areas that require specialist knowledge. A collective run by a specialist provides that knowledge as part of the package, without the council needing to build it internally.
• Money — Stays in the community. Every pound saved on energy is a pound that's available for the community services that councils exist to provide. When a local council trims several hundred pounds off its annual energy costs, that money doesn't disappear into a corporate margin. It supports the events, maintenance and small infrastructure improvements that make communities work.

Utility Aid has been working in the town and parish council sector for nearly 25 years. There are currently 444 councils who are members of our collective purchasing arrangement. Last year our bill-checking service recovered more than £353,000 across our council customers, an average of £745 per organisation. Those are figures that reflect a specific truth: the small errors and overcharges that suppliers introduce into invoices are worth picking up, and catching them at scale returns real money to communities.

The most common question we get asked by councils considering collective purchasing is whether it's suitable for their specific circumstances. It's a fair question. Not every council needs collective purchasing. A council whose energy costs are very low, or whose contract is already particularly well structured, may be better off staying as they are. The collective purchasing model works best for councils whose energy costs are high but not so high as to justify a dedicated team, and whose arrangements have been in place long enough that the market has moved past them.

Utility Aid's collective purchasing arrangement doesn't require a complex commitment: a short conversation with one of our specialists will tell you whether your council could benefit and how the transition would work for you if you decided to join. There's no charge for your call and no obligation to sign up.

The key point is that town and parish councils are stronger when working together than when apart. That's true across almost everything councils do, whether it's sharing best practice, learning from each other's approaches or standing together on issues that affect the sector. In terms of energy, the case for acting collectively is particularly strong, and the benefits are measurable in the pounds saved and returned to local communities.

That's a good result for individual councils and a better one for the communities they serve.

The following blog post is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional or legal advice. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Association of Local Councils. Any links to external sources included in this blog post are provided for convenience and do not constitute endorsement or approval of those websites' content, products, services, or policies. Therefore, readers should use discretion and judgment when applying the information to their circumstances. Finally, this blog post may be updated or revised without notice.