British Gas Part 2

Sure enough, British Gas turned into a battle. Exactly as I predicted in my previous post, they went back on the deal.

The last time I'd spoken to them the agreement was that they would look at my consumption over a two week period and base my bill on the average daily usage of that period. Seemed fair, I could not disagree with that.

So the two weeks pass and I get a phone call from British Gas. Thank-you for the meter readings, we've now had readings from Neon Reef and your bill is £396.

But that wasn't what we'd agreed. Didn't matter, this is now what we, British Gas, have decided that we are doing regardless of what was put in place before. On the plus side, be grateful. We've dropped your bill by £100 so what are you complaining about? Plus you can't argue with a meter reading.

Well, yes, I can argue with it. For two reasons. First, it is still showing a usage far in excess of what I'm actually consuming. I'm getting through around 8kWh a day. Their figures show about 20.

You could damn near hear the shoulder shrug.

The second thing I argued was that Neon Reef had never had a meter reading from me. My smart meter apparently wasn't compatible with their systems and I had not had time to submit any readings to them before they went bust. So where had it come from? It was obviously an estimate based on my closing reading from PFP when I switched.

The woman from British Gas was not budging. She just repeated that the bill was the bill and the readings were the readings. Total disinterest. And why should there be any interest? It is not in their favour to get to the bottom of it or act fairly. What am I going to do? Go somewhere else?

All I could do was refuse to accept it and every time she suggested something, payment plans, credit agreements, etc., I said no. Give me a deadlock letter so I can go to the Ombudsman.

Let me speak to my supervisor about how we can help you pay.

No, just give me the deadlock letter so I can go to the Ombudsman.

Let me see if I can spread the payments over 12 months.

No, just give me the deadlock letter so I can go to the Ombudsman.

I cannot emphasise enough how important this is. If they will not accept your complaint then be stubborn. Do not back down and just keep repeating "Ombudsman".

Whatever they say.

Ombudsman.

Every suggestion.

Ombudsman. Ombudsman. Ombudsman.

If this is not going in your favour then this is what you need to be doing. Do not get bogged down in the quagmire of any utility company's complaint system because it will never go in your favour.

The Ombudsman is the independent adjudicator in energy company disagreements. All the bigger companies are signed up to them as the final word in complaints. I've used them before in similar circumstances, Iresa went bust and I got transferred to Octopus who then botched the transfer. I got nowhere with Octopus but the Ombudsman investigated, found in my favour and I ended up getting a little bit of compensation. It was actually a really smooth process, the Ombudsman service was helpful and fair. I think there are also penalties for energy companies who end up in Ombudsman cases so there is a big disincentive to let a complaint go that far.

But to get to use the Ombudsman service you either need to wait eight weeks from your original complaint or you have to receive what's called a deadlock letter from the supplier. This states that the complaint has reached a point where no agreement is possible. That is your ticket to the Ombudsman.

So I just kept repeating it over and over. Send me the deadlock letter.

And it worked. After the final call where it was agreed this is what would happen. I got another call a couple of hours later. Suddenly British Gas had decided that, in this case, they would base my bill on the average figures I had given them.

My bill had gone from the original which had been around £600 to £140 once all the various credits from PFP and Neon Reef had been added. That's almost a 75% reduction because I knew I was right and refused to give in to them.

That is absolutely sickening and makes me wonder exactly how many other people were in the same position when Neon Reef and the other companies went bust. There must be hundreds, even thousands, of people who got ridiculously high estimated bills and just paid it because they think it must be right or British Gas tried to intimidate them into paying it. It is shocking that they can be allowed to get away with this with no penalty whatsoever.

I've read theories that the reason they are doing it is that they know the overestimates will eventually have to be repaid but it nets them a huge excess of cash up front so that they can use for business operations. It is basically a line of credit that the customers are paying for. If that is true then it really is awful.

And the other thing that has not been addressed is backing out of the agreed tariff which customers of Neon Reef had been given when they were transferred over. This was supposed to have been fixed until June but they used some very sneaky wording in the fine print to wriggle out of it.

British Gas are a bunch of crooks. There is no other way of putting it. As a company it is immoral and unethical to behave in the way it has done. OK, they have arguably stayed within the limits of the law but I don't think anyone for a moment can argue that they are honest.

While we are on the subject of complaints, I've actually got two positive stories. First, my car insurance. As mentioned in a previous post, someone hit my car in February and agreed to pay for the damage. I notified my insurers of the accident, as you are required to do by law, but that I was not making any claims.

So I got my renewal and spotted that my no-claims discount had been reduced to 3 years from 10 years and my premium had been hiked up to reflect that. I got on the phone to them, the woman I spoke to was extremely helpful. The claim was removed, everything sorted and my new quote issued. Surprisingly, it is actually lower than any other quote I've had from any of the comparison sites so I will renew with them. So to counter the awful service of British Gas, here is a little bit of praise for Zenith Insurance. For once, a company that actually did their job well. It was actually a really nice experience.

The other one was Heinz. It sounds stupid but I had a bottle of tomato sauce explode in my cupboard. I heard a hissing, opened the door and saw sauce everywhere. Not happy, I posted the pic and my complaint of their FB page. I got a message asking for my name and address and now I've got £10 in supermarket vouchers. So it pays to complain.
 

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.