Pre payment metre nightmare help

boogiemaster

My friend lost her job when the company she worked for went bankrupt and owing a large amount of money to creditors.
She never got any wages and had to go on benefits while she looked for another job, meanwhile she could not pay any bills and British gas arranged to have some token metres fitted to pay back the debt for gas and electric she owed.
She managed to get another job and phoned up British gas to see how much she owed in arrears.
She paid the arrears off and waited for British gas to change the metres back to standard metres.
After two weeks she phoned them up to se why they hadn’t come to change the metres to normal ones.
British gas informed her that she would have to go through a credit check first and then if she had some bad credit? She would have to pay a deposit of £175!
But she informed British gas she was in debt because she had lost her job and got behind with her payments and was on the credit ref agency.
She has since brought her payments up to date and all her creditors have put settled on her files, British gas did do a search and informed her that she would have to pay a deposit of £175 before the metres would be changed.
Can British gas do this once your debt has been paid? She doesn’t want to pay the deposit as she has cleared the debt and feels like she is being treated unfairly.
Any advice from someone in the same situation would come in handy, thanks.