Stolen Electricity!

samlouise02 · 21 May 2011 at 2:05PM

last year refurbishment of my flats and block was carried out by Lengard, a building contractor on behalf of Southwark Council.

Due to the fact that I work, I left a set of keys with the Resident Liaison officer, so that they could access my property to carry out works.

In November I was away for around 5 days in which time they were in my flat carrying out works.

I came back to find that my electricity key was missing from the meter, so I contacted the Liaison officer to ask where it had gone as the builders had told me my electricity had run out.
They couldn't locate the key so I ordered a replacement from EDF Energy. When it arrived around 2 weeks later (during which time I had to stay with my mother) I put the key in the meter only to realise that the meter was actually broke. I had an engineer come out to replace the meter who informed me that the meter had been tampered with.

they sent out an investigator who just replaced the meter and nothing else was mentioned.

I recently noticed that my electricity consumption was higher than usual lately so I contacted EDF today who has informed me that during the period that the meter was blown up, I had ran up a £617.00 bill and the reason it seemed I was using up electricity is because they are charging me a weekly fee to reduce this balance.

EDF has also informed me that they have the key top up records from when I first moved to this property till now and they can see that my payments were regular and covered the amount of electricity consumption coming from my flat up until that meter was blown up. I have a pay as you go meter and on average I use around £30 a month. I don't think it is humanly possible to use up £617.00 worth of electricity within the period of a month.

Basically Lengard had been stealing my electricity. EDF have said that this is a third party dispute and because Lengard was contracted by Southwark Council it is their responsibility to sort this out.

I have never had to deal with something like this before and I have no idea how to get this issue resolved.

if anyone could point me in the right direction i would be very grateful

4$£&*(£$&*(! · 21 May 2011 at 6:13PM

I would contact Southwark at the first instance and get some legal advice.

chanz4 · 21 May 2011 at 9:45PM

Theft of electricty or anyone using your property under your tennancy period is your liablilty. Its normaly so builder or worked dont have to charge, normaly they just do a cable between term 1 &4