How it pays to be nice! The top ten big firms to haggle with and their call centre secrets

**Martin Lewis** (0:01)
As that was substantially cheaper than the April price cap, you have been saving since May. We do not have a right to a cheaper price, but they do not have a right to our custom.

**Adrian Chiles** (0:09)
My mates at school always used to say I'd end up with a brown maxi.

**Martin Lewis** (0:13)
I'm on a fix, I should fix. No, in the right industries, you can often save a shetland. Olivia, hit the track. Hello, I'm Martin Lewis, and this is the cunningly named The Martin Lewis Podcast. I do wonder what that's going to be about. And this is our Big Topic episode, each week we lead on a main subject to help you save. Now, much of it comes from my BBC Radio 5 live show with Adrian Chiles, but there's also bonus money saving tips and tricks just for you lucky, lucky podcast listeners.
In today's episode, our big topic is haggling, specifically call center haggling for broadband TV, breakdown cover, insurance firms, and more. Many can save hundreds of pounds a year with just a simple phone call. I'll tell you the top 10 big firms to haggle with, I'll give you my top haggling tips, but also we've got top tips that call center staff has told us too, including one that I genuinely found really shocking.
Plus with the agreement to extend the ceasefire in the Middle East, wholesale energy prices have dropped. So what does that mean for domestic energy bills? When will they get cheaper? And is now the time to fix? And in this week's Money Mastermind, it's all about a tax-free savings allowance few know about. Will Adrian? We'll see. Play the theme tune.

**Adrian Chiles** (1:43)
Martin, I understand you haven't got your BBC Pass with you, and that actually means you don't exist. You're a non-person.

**Martin Lewis** (1:51)
I have a temporary pass, Adrian. Am I a temporary person?

**Adrian Chiles** (1:53)
You're a temporary person, but very temporary. It only lasts the day, then you cease to exist again. You haven't lost it completely, have you, your actual pass?

**Martin Lewis** (2:03)
Somewhere between being in the studio last week and leaving the door of the studio, my pass disappeared.

**Adrian Chiles** (2:09)
The consequences for this are grave. It's the most unbelievable amount of faff. In fact, I don't feel as if I can broadcast with you. I think I'll have to ask you to leave.

**Martin Lewis** (2:18)
Okay, fine.

**Adrian Chiles** (2:19)
No, actually, don't go till one o'clock, then you might well be led away. I wish you well on your journey with doing a new pass.

**Martin Lewis** (2:26)
I've been there before, I'm not happy.

**Adrian Chiles** (2:28)
Energy bills, then. What are we thinking now in the light of peace breaking out at least temporarily?

**Martin Lewis** (2:35)
So it depends which bills you're talking about. I think it's worth starting. I have a graph in front of me. It is the UK natural gas price. If you'd like to look at it yourself, I'd go to trading economics and you want UK natural gas. I'm looking at the six month chart. And it is really worth a look. I'm going to try and paint you a picture of what's happened. Because this is what feeds in to the prices that we all pay. Now, there are lots of other factors in our energy bills. Policy costs are huge and the costs of the company and the retailers. But the big changeable factor, the thing that moves most rapidly is these underlying wholesale rates. And even though I'm talking about the UK natural gas rate, because so much of our electricity is generated at the final point, the marginal call by gas. Actually, this has a huge impact on the price of electricity too. So this is the graph that counts if you like. So what you had, you had at the start of the year, while there were a couple of little peaks, you had the price was around 70 to 80 pence was pretty typical. So have that in your head. Let's call that normal, what the relatively recent normal has been, 70 to 80 pence. We then had at the start of March, we had the start of the conflict going on in the Middle East, and the price immediately shot up to around 1 pound 30, 1 pound 40, peaking at 1 pound 50 Stayed there for a while, dipped just before April down to around a pound again, but then went up to around 120 So, the big picture since the Middle East conflict started, a move up from 70 to 80p to somewhere between 1 pound and 1 pound 50 So, you can see that that is, you know, it's a minimum 30 to 100% rise in that underlying rate of wholesale gas and electricity.