The result was a new regime from March last year in which Ofgem set “capital targets” for each supplier to ensure financial resilience. And the secondary effect was an entertaining quarrel between Octopus Energy, which confessed to being one of three suppliers below its capital target, and British Gas-owning Centrica, whose chief executive argued it was “criminal” that the regulator was not applying its ultimate sanction of barring under-target firms from taking on new customers.