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.

The Electricity/Energy Situation

 Like about a million other people I got caught up in the run of electricity companies going bust. I was with PFP and I only found out when I went on the website to check my bill.

And now energy prices are through the roof. At the time I got swapped to British Gas as "supplier of last resort". It sounds all very procedural according to OFGEM. But according to the very bitter email I received from PFP (which incidentally was a not for profit aimed at bringing reasonably priced energy to homes that needed it) this is not the case. According to them, the customers of failed energy companies are Dutch auctioned amongst the five big suppliers. It's a bidding process and in PFP's case British Gas "won".

From the start I was told not to swap supplier as it can cause "confusion". Well, I could not give a toss about confusion. The writing was on the wall: energy was soaring in price and the price cap was getting pushed up in October. So I totally ignored that advice and started looking for a reasonably priced deal.

The first bad sign was that quite a few of the better known "cheap" suppliers had already been gobbled up by the big suppliers while they were still in the black. Why would they do that if not to remove competition?

Next was that a number of switching websites were only offering deals from companies that they had "partnered" with. By that I can only assume they meant they were taking money from to direct their way.

Another issue I found with switching sites is that they are set up for a more competitive market than exists now. uSwitch and many others are designed to take your details, look at your current plan and show you who is cheaper. Great in a market working the way it is supposed to. That's just not today. So when no-one is cheaper you get a blank screen. As far as I could see there was no option to just show me the entire market and I'll make my own decision. If you don't have any supplier then you are screwed.

In the end I've gone with Neon Reef. They were the cheapest of what was on offer but by no way cheap. But even this is not straight forward. They will give you an estimate of what you will be paying a month based on your usage figures. Great, looks good.

But the next page is where you get the kick in the balls. What they actually showed you is the average over the year. The way they run payments is that for six months you pay 50% extra so that they can buy contracts for energy for the last six months of your deal. It turns out that instead of paying £40'ish a month like what they lured me in with, I am actually paying £65 a month for the first six months then £35 for the next six months.

That's a pretty big financial shock if you are running a budget where every penny is accounted for. An extra £25 a month needs to come from somewhere. It doesn't matter that my bill will drop in half next May, I need that money here and now.

I'm pretty lucky in that I can massage my budget so that it adapts to that. It still means cutting something else out of my budget for now (I've got a few options for that and not decided which is going). For a lot of people that is simply not affordable. I would guess that is how most energy suppliers are going to start operating. Charging you up front fees so that you can have cheap energy on average over the year. Trouble is, for people who are already facing fuel poverty that isn't going to happen. They can't just magic up an extra £25-35 a month for a short period.

So what happens to them? Stuck on the big 5 suppliers at their inflated prices because they have a captive market and shareholders to keep happy. Utility switching is something else that is now a privilege of the middle class.

This is something that has always pissed me off about "personal finance" experts that populate social media. They are almost always aimed at the middle class and are about getting more for less by using the leverage that being middle class brings.

It's about leveraging good credit scores. Having cash that you can afford to move around different bank accounts to get cheap deals. Two-for-one deals on dining out and hotel rooms. That kind of thing. If you can't afford a treat from your local chippy then none of this has any relevance.

It's sold as "advice" but the reality is it's more like school gate gossip. It's not about financial survival. The usual response for people like that is "speak to Citizen's Advice". They don't want you. This is about people who already have "stuff" getting more "stuff" while those that need it are shut out.

There is a lot about what is happening right now that I do not understand. There is a government that is performing dreadfully, one of the worst performing in modern history. Even if you factor out covid there is no getting away from how badly Johnson et al have done since they took power. No-one is opposing that. The other parties are dead in the water. The media is largely supportive of the government, including the BBC. But worst of all, there is no public backlash. Where are the protests? The only thing you see are a bunch of affluent London pensioners and trust fund students lashing themselves to the M25 over insulation. It is incomprehensible that the public, regardless of political leaning, should tolerate such utter incompetence and bad management.

We are also an affluent, stable democracy (and if you don't believe that you need to look at most of the rest of the world). But we have collapsing supply chains. Food shortages. Fuel shortages. Sky-high energy and utility prices. Massive inflation and a stagnating economy (a bounce-back to pre-covid levels is not growth regardless of how it is spun). These are the conditions you would expect to see in emerging economies.

It is baffling.

New Year Update

 Start of the New Year. I'm really forcing myself to write because I cannot be arsed at all. Mentally I'm stuck in that same old rut of nothing happening and my brain is turning to mush. Likewise, my mental state is following it. I can't say I feel stressed or depressed. It's something else. Bored, maybe? Just fucking chronically bored out of my mind with looking at the same four walls. Staring at a laptop screen all day. Nothing to do at night except watch TV.

It is driving me fucking insane. Before Christmas we'd been asked to start working out of the office again. I was really apprehensive and got stressed out of my mind about it. But it actually turned out OK. In the little section where I worked there were three of us. Tons of space, lots of ventilation. I felt pretty confident about being back. It was only when the post-Christmas lockdown was announced that I realised how much I was enjoying it.

It had made a massive difference to my mental state. Leaving the house and going to work brought a little bit of normality back. Seeing other people. Being able to have conversations about trivia rather than all work. I liked it and I'd missed it.

The other thing I missed was being warm. I'd forgotten how fucking hard to heat this house is. Luckily my daughter doesn't feel the cold. She's quite happy wearing fleeces and giant hoodies. But not me. Sitting in the spare room I use as an office I am absolutely freezing. A few times, today was one of them, I was physically shivering. One thing I only discovered today is how good a hot water bottle is. I stuffed it under my fleece against my belly and the difference was incredible. It made me feel so much better.

The other thing I do is work out at lunchtime. I've found that if I start at 8.30 then the cold starts to become uncomfortable around 11.30. I can push it another hour then at 12.30 I go and train. Sitting there in front of a screen for hours is the problem. The blood isn't flowing. But I find if I go and do a bit of hard exercise then I'm good for another few hours. Then by about 3.30-4pm I don't mind doing a few short blasts of my little fan heater.

Financially, Christmas was okay. I had to transfer about £100 from my savings to cover it all but other than that I survived alright. I'd tried to prepare in advance. When I was a kid my mum always had the Christmas Box. Whenever she was out she'd buy something extra, something that either we would need for Christmas or would just make a nice treat. So now I do that. Starting in October, every time I go to the supermarket I buy something extra for the Christmas Box. And by Christmas Day I've got a nice little supply of both Christmas essentials and a few luxuries. You don't really notice the cost and the end result is that my "big" Christmas shop isn't much different to my normal weekly one.

I get a Christmas dinner pack from the local butcher. It saves a ton of money compared to the supermarket. You get a 2.5kg turkey crown, a tray of their hand made pigs in blankets, a load of sausages and a big pack of bacon all for £30. There's about a good 10 meals of food that went into the freezer just from leftovers.

Presents. I only have my daughter to buy anything major for. In a normal year I wouldn't see my parents til January so their presents come out of that month's budget. This year? Who knows. I did some baking and sent them a few treats instead rather than presents through the post. But for my daughter I spent maybe £300? It wasn't far off what I'd budgeted. I started putting aside £20 a week starting in October so that when I came around to pay my credit card bill for December I had enough to cover her presents.

The big financial problem I've got at the minute is that one of my old fillings disintegrated at the weekend. I patched it up with one of those repair kits and went to see the dentist today. I was registered with an NHS dentist but, stupidly, I'd not been for a long time so got dumped. The only place I could get seen at was a local private dentist. Partly practices aren't taking on patients because of covid but it seems that no-one wants to do NHS treatment now either.
So I went, knowing that this is going to be a fucking disaster. I'd been stressing about it all week. I get there, she does X-rays and pokes around and starts telling me my options. Cheapest is an extraction at £80. The other option is a root filling at... £650. Then she starts talking about implants like we're talking about a new tyre for my car. £2000 and she's acting like it's nothing.

It really saddens me. I'm in a position where I could, in theory, slap the £650 on my credit card. But there is a hell of a lot of people who can't. It's fucking disgusting that in a country like hours that good dentistry is beyond the reach of people on even a decent salary. Who has £600 to spend on a fucking filling in one tooth?

So unless you are fairly affluent... bye-bye tooth. That's the reality for most people. It's incredible that if you are not wealthy then your only dentistry option is the same thing we were doing 200 years ago. I imagine for the average person who isn't with an NHS dentist then instead of the traditional "how much will this hurt?" they are worrying about "how much will this cost?".

That's been the reality of this pandemic for the average person. For most working class people the big worry has not been whether or not they get sick, it has been whether or not they will lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose everything. The inequality and the fragility of existence for a working class person in Britain is awful. It makes me both sad and angry.

Anyway, I think my next step is to try to find either an NHS dentist or someone willing to do something cheaper. I can't believe that the only replacement for a £20 filling is £650 of work or just take the fucking thing out. That's bullshit.

I've got a few financial aims for this year but I think I'll save that for another post.

Hot and Cold (mostly cold): Fuel Poverty

You can go about your day and not really notice that you are skint. But when you come home to a freezing cold house then there is no getting away from it. If you have to ask "should I be warm or not?" then there is no avoiding how skint you are.

On the nights that my daughter isn't here I don't put the heating on. I put a fleece on instead.

I'm lucky that I've got a woodburner, I can light that and heat just the living room and it doesn't really cost an awful lot. It gets hot fast and stays warm all night.

When my daughter is with me then I have to put the central heating on. Part of that is obviously wanting her to be comfortable. But the other big part is that I don't want her seeing that I have no money. I hate weekends when I've got her because if we are home then the heating is on. It's one of the things I really hate. It's maybe one of the most demeaning things there is. You can eat cheap. You can buy decent clothes second hand off Ebay. You can bike or bus where you need to go. But the one thing you can't really do much about is heating.

What really brings it home to me is that my house isn't on mains gas. It runs off propane tanks and they are a total ballache. For starters, they cost a fortune. At the minute, the cheapest round here is about £64 for a 49kg bottle (the big, tall ones). Then add a delivery charge to that which is another £5-10. Plus you've got to be here for them, so if you're working full time then you are screwed.

So maybe 75 quid plus time off work for a bottle that'll last 5 weeks if I'm careful with it. Careful means using it only for heating so no hot water. If I want hot water to do the dishes I boil a kettle. When it's bath night for my daughter we go to the local pool for a swim instead. That is about £60 a month just for gas, electricity is another £35. In my old house I paid around £50 a month for both, here it costs nearly double and that's not even using it as much. If my house was as warm as it should be I'd be looking at about £120 a month easy.

I went into my daughter's room one morning during the Christmas holidays and she was asleep with her coat on and her hood up. It breaks my heart and I don't really know what to do about it. It feels like living in another time when I'm hoping for spring to come and things will warm up.

One thing that has really helped is trying to cut down draughts. The stairs are in the living room so any heat just vanished upwards. I put up a curtain across the top of the stairs at the weekend and that's helped a lot. You can actually feel a definite temperature drop when you go through it now. It's a pain in the arse, I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck one day, but I think it is worth the effort. The night after I did it was actually the first night I'd felt warm all winter.

The back door is also off the living room so I put a pair of curtains over that as well to try to make some insulation, too. It's making the place a bit claustrophobic but if I stay warm then I can live with that. I'm in the arse end of nowhere so there's nothing to look at anyway except trees.

The bastard gas also ran out at the weekend. I absolutely fucking dread when it happens because it is such palaver trying to get a refill. If I could just chuck a bottle in the back of the car then it would be fine. But they weigh about 100kg when full so no chance of moving it. I've got a small one, 19kg, that I could swap for a full one but they are loads more expensive and I'm lucky if it lasts two weeks.

I'm doing an experiment to see if electric heating is going to work out cheaper. I've got a little fan heater that I use to take the chill off the living room and I bought an oil filled radiator for my daughter's room today. It was only 30 quid from B&Q and they have a 5% deal at Topcashback (which I'm a big fan of) right now. Came to £28.50. It's on the low setting which seems to warm her room up nice and according to the Bulb (my electricity supplier) website it will only cost about 9p per hour to run at night. A quick calc looks like about £7-8 a month. That has to be cheaper than gas if it works.

I'm lucky enough that the house came with a wood-stove in the living room. When I'm here on my own I use that. I make a rule that I don't light it before 8pm and if I haven't lit it by 9pm then I don't bother. It is only small but it kicks out a decent amount of heat and holds it well. Most of the time I light a small fire and just let it burn down and that's enough. I sit right next to it like I was a Victorian peasant.

Doing some exercise is good, too. When I come in from work and the house is freezing then I do a workout and have a quick shower. With your blood moving you don't notice the cold for maybe an hour or so. Usually I'll be in the kitchen making tea anyway.

Being cold is shit. It really is. It definitely is one of the worst parts of having no money.