British Gas - Fleecing The Public

I submitted my end-of-the-price-cap meter readings like everyone else and got my bill through from British Gas.

£396

My heart sunk when I saw that and my first thought, like many, is "where the fuck am I getting that money from?". Obviously, I was expecting a higher than normal bill. Usually electricity costs me £35-40 a month so was budgeting maybe £55. The bill covered the period from 3rd of December, when I got switched from the bankrupt Neon Reef to British Gas, to the 31st March when the price cap changes. So more or less four months. That would have been around £220. I was £140 in credit with Neon Reef so was expecting a bill of £80'ish.

Instead, with the £140 credit, I'm looking at £260'ish. That's nearly £100 a month for electricity.

That was a terrifying thought. I really cannot see how I could sustain an extra £65 a month on top of everything else. It spiked my anxiety through the roof. Not only did I not have the money to pay for my current bill, I really did not know how I was going to pay my bills to come. It was depressing seeing as how I'd finally started feeling like I'd turned the corner financially. And now this sets me back again and wipes out all the work I've done.

So I did what I really did not want to do. I reached for the good credit card, the emergency one, and figured I'd use that, get clear of the debt now, come up with a way to pay it off manageably and then budget a bit tighter from now on.

And then I thought... wait a fucking minute. How do I know what they are charging me is right? I'm just taking their word for it.

So I got the figures they were using (which was a battle in itself which I will outline in another post) and just looked at what they said my electricity consumption had been. It was averaging 21kWh a day over the last four months. My smart meter has a daily history and over that period the highest reading was 10kWh and it averaged around 7.5kWh. So they were billing me for three times my actual consumption.

I'll repeat that as it absolutely staggered me: British Gas were billing me for three times the electricity I was actually using.

Here is the problem. My supplier last year was PFP. They went bust in the autumn so I switched to Neon Reef as they were still offering a reasonable fixed rate deal. Neon Reef then immediately went bust before I could even get my first bill from them. I was then swapped to British Gas under the Seller of Last Resort OFGEM arrangements, starting supply with them on the 3rd of December.

In amongst this shit-show my meter readings got lost. PFP's website was closed so I can't access my smart-meter data. Neon Reef did not work with the type of meter that I had installed and they folded so quickly after I joined them that I did not have time to submit my first reading to them. What readings I'd written down I had lost in the subsequent four months since it all happened.

So once I'd submitted my 31st March reading to British Gas they then estimated what my starting read must have been on the 3rd of December based on an incredible 21kWh a day.

Just to repeat: three times what my actual consumption was.

I fully accept responsibility for losing my meter readings. That's my fault entirely. With such a chaotic situation I should have been more careful. Stupidly I thought that having a smart-meter would solve all that.

But that does not excuse British Gas's behaviour. If you are going to make an estimate then you need to at least use a reasonable figure. Even OFGEM's own data suggests that the average UK household uses 8kWh a day. So where does British Gas get 21kWh from?

That's really puzzled me. It seems such an egregious over-estimation that it has to be deliberate. You don't just arrive at a figure almost three times what the energy regulator's data says at random. There is thought and reasoning behind it.

It was only through talking with other people that I realised what they were doing. This appears to be a deliberate policy across the board and the best hypothesis that I've seen so far is that they are trying to raise as much cash now as they can by grossly overestimating bills and then repay it down the line as a refund. Basically, they are using the public as a cheap source of short-term credit. It is essentially a 3 or 4 month interest free loan.

This is incredibly cynical and manipulative. They are sowing fear in their customers, hitting the ones they can with an inflated estimated bill knowing that the majority will pay it without querying it and then "discover" the error down the line when they've used all that free credit to forward buy energy contracts.

People are absolutely fucking terrified at the moment. Part of that is the media fanning the flames. There wouldn't be half as much anxiety in the country if the scum of the media stopped milking it. There are no "good" media sources any more, even the BBC has turned into just another hysterical soundbite generator. But most of it is genuine. People really are struggling for money. People who six months ago were doing OK have now dropped below the poverty line through no fault of their own. People who are still doing OK are seeing that bar get ever closer to them. This horrendous government has so successfully got the public to look at the poor and think "Urgh, that will never be me" but it is backfiring. The public is now looking at the poor and thinking "oh shit, that could be me next".

And to have giant companies like British Gas milking that is absolutely outrageous. But the worst part of it is that these companies will walk away without even a slap on the wrist. They will get away with it because they always get away with it. Even if they do get found out and do get fined, any "punishment" will be such a tiny blip on their figures that it won't knock a penny off the bonuses of the bastards at the top.

Anyway, this is still going. I eventually managed to speak to some woman in their complaints team. Apart from being incredibly patronising and more or less accused me of lying, she did her best to resist doing anything to remedy the situation. It struck me that her role was not to solve issues but to manage what customers thought of British Gas. "I know we're robbing you but don't you think we are really nice for doing it?".

Eventually, she agreed to monitor my usage for two weeks to check my average consumption and base the estimate on that. This only came after I'd spent 15 minutes saying "no" to everything else she suggested. And immediately after I'd said the word "ombudsman".

So that is what has happened. I've tracked my usage for the last 14 days and it comes to 7.7kWh per day on average. Almost exactly one third of what they have estimated it at.

I don't know what happens next. I do not expect them to simply accept this figure and base the estimate off that. I think they will haggle, try to push something more like 10 or 12kWh. But I guess I just need to keep saying "ombudsman" over and over.

I will update the blog once I get a resolution.