British gas !!!! up

ben317

In July I moved out of a shared house of 8 students when our contract ended (don't get the wrong idea, we paid the bills, honest!) and contacted British Gas to give them the final readings. They then had to use estimated readings, as their agents on the phone had no record of them coming in and exchanging our meter several months prior to this, and so the readings we were giving them didn't match up to what they had on record. We paid the final electricity bill and thought it was all closed and finished.

However, it's term time again, and so new people are in the house and we've had another bill from BG, who claim it is because now they have accurate first readings from the new tenants, we owe them money. This just doesn't seem fair - they messed up and didnt have an accurate record of the property, and we agreed to them using estimated readings which could have been more or less than the actual usage either way, surely they can't now come back and expect us to pay the difference?

They've asked for the readings from when we moved out, which I'm not even sure I have as I thought this was all closed off - lesson learnt I guess! Any advice welcomed!

SwanJon

If the person you spoke to last time did their job properly they will have recorded the reads in the notes - get them to look there.
Depending on how much is at stake, you could ask them to listen back to that call to find the readings. You might find that they'll adjust the bill rather than look.

Who was responsible in between you moving out and the new tenants moving in (?Landlord). Could they have used any electricity?

ben317

Thanks for the tip - it's about 200 quid on top of the hundreds they've already had so by no means an insignificant amount. As it's a student property the house has been empty all summer, but I do know that some cleaning and possibly decorating went on; I doubt it was enough to make this much of a discrepancy though! Basicaly it seems to me that their estimate was wrong and now they want the full amount.