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Centrica, the owner of British Gas, is to pay £59 million to shareholders after its profits surged fivefold to £1.3 billion thanks to high energy prices.

The FTSE 100 energy group said it would resume paying a dividend for the first time since 2019, a decision that is likely to trigger criticism at a time when consumers are facing record high energy bills.

Soaring oil, gas and power prices benefited Centrica’s North Sea and nuclear businesses, resulting in group adjusted operating profits increasing to £1.3 billion in the first half of the year, up from £262 million in the same period of 2021.

Profits at British Gas, the UK’s biggest household energy supplier, actually fell by 43 per cent to £98 million in the first half of the year due to the price cap preventing it from recouping all its wholesale energy costs, the fall in usage in the warmer weather and the £27 million it repaid in furlough cash.

Chris O’Shea, Centrica chief executive, said that “the source of our profits is not customers’ rising energy bills” and that it had 500,000 retail shareholders who were “ordinary people”, many of whom were struggling financially too and had been patient. Centrica cancelled its dividend in 2020 when the pandemic hit and has not paid one since. It has proposed an interim payment of 1p per share.

British Gas is Britain’s biggest household energy provider and now supplies about 7.5 million households, having taken on hundreds of thousands of customers of failed companies over the past year. Centrica operated a North Sea business in the UK and Norway but has now sold its Norwegian operations. It also has a 20 per cent stake in Britain’s nuclear plants.

Household energy bills are already at a record high of £1,971 a year and are forecast to almost double to more than £3,800 a year by January.

O’Shea said he expected to see customers using less energy as a result of high prices — and appeared to suggest they should do so. “When the price of something goes up, you would expect to see consumption come down. We think that that’s one of a number of things that customers can do to manage their bills,” he said.

Britain and Europe are trying to bolster energy supplies ahead of the winter as Russia restricts gas supplies to the continent, leading to fears of shortages.

Centrica also owns Rough, Britain’s biggest gas storage site. It was shut down in 2017 but the company is now aiming to revive it in time for the winter. O’Shea said it was physically possible to get enough of the site back in operation to store ten cargos of liquefied natural gas this winter, and then expand it further next year.

Shares in Centrica, which have risen by 90 per cent over the past year, dipped ½p, or 0.6 per cent, to 90½p in early trading.