Scottish Power Monthly Direct Debit amounts

Premier_2

This may affect new/recently joined customers only.

Have you just got a silly revised monthly payment from Scottish Power? :eek: If so, call them up and they may change it back straight away


This is what has just happened to me. As some of you may remember, a couple of months ago (that's when it went live) I switched to Scottish Power OES12 tariff. I was already with SP on another tariff for electricity and switched my gas to them.

I keep good records of my usage and so can calculate the annual price and also monitor that the consumption is in line with my expectation. I originally proposed a monthly DD which SP accepted which was slightly over 1/12 of the anticipated annual cost. (The complication that the bill needs to be ideally zero at the review point didn't really affect me as the review is about the time I switched)

Now last weekend we received a message to provide meter readings which we duly did. Actually we were presently surprised as the readings were actually about 5% less than we had anticipated, but assumed no change to DD at this stage.

I see we just got an email last Wednesday informing us of a revision to the monthly payment. Before reading it fully, I assumed SP wanted to be really accurate and reduce the monthly DD payment slightly to allow for the lower usage (and perhaps the fact that my original monthly payment was 2.5% over what I expected to use anyway - so now I'm using 7.5% less than I originally was paying for)

To my surprise, (or maybe not as this seems a common issue), Scottish Power were actually increasing my monthly payments by almost 45% :eek::eek::eek:

I've just called them up, prepared to go through the numbers with them, and I never got to that - all I said was I was calling regarding the advice the DD payment was increasing and she said "Wait a minute, let me see ... ah yes,I see, I've now put it back to the original level. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

Now normally my answer to this question is no, but I thought wait a minute
"Yes there is something further. Could you explain why it increased in the first place?"
The answer was that a meter reader came also.:think:

I've no idea how that affects matters, or whether it was just an excuse. I gave our reading last weekend, and the email came Wednesday (remembering Monday was a bank holiday too), so unless the meter reader gave a completely false reading I have no idea. If so, I thought it odd that my readings were accepted without discussion over those of a professional meter reader.
Anyway I didn't argue further, happy that the monthly DD was put back.

So if you are not happy with a revision to a monthly DD payment - call them, they may, like they did to me, just revise it back without any debate.


Edit: I have just checked my online account. On the RHS is an option "Manage my payments" which you can then expand show show the detailed calculation. I wish I had done this before ringing them as it may have changed since, but now it shows more or less as I calculate (actually they suggest I'm only overpaying by about 6% rather than 7.5% , but close enough)

Actually the calculation in detail is still out as they assume I will use about 10% more electricity than I do (they should have the same data as me on this since they have supplied my electricity for a couple of years) and 5% less on gas than I use (but they may not have the detail I have for this as we only recently changed to them)