BG warm home discount scheme

Lucid74

This post is I hope here to help you or at least i hope to make some of you contact British Gas or your MP's to help a few others.

Its a simple problem to do with British gas and there warm home discount scheme which is part of the governments policy to tackle fuel poverty.

the reason i am posting is this i met an odd thing today, a visious circle.

Under these rules if you are poor and spend 10% of your income on fuel you qualify for this poverty scheme. However if you are equally poor and spend less than 10% of your income on fuel because you turn your heating off and dont use as much gas/electricity you dont qualify.


to put it simply


Income: £5600 Incapacity benefit since 2003.

debt repayment: Something i'd like not to have.

Bill British Gas £240 per year ( i turned the heating and hot water off in February, the bill would have been £600 plus for the year without doing so and i couldnt afford it)

== Sorry you spend less than 5% of your income on electric you are to poor to qualify for the scheme.




This is what i was told by BG today and i felt sorry for the woman who had to tell me that. She asked all the question that were required, put everything through the computer and it came back with the answer no you dont qualify because you dont spend enough. She even went to her superviser to check that it was true because she didn't believe it herself. I dont turn my heating on because i cant afford to and the result is i dont spend enough money to qualify for the fuel poverty scheme.


The result of this computer hiccup, those who can afford to pay for electricity and gas recieve £120 to help them pay for it. those who cant afford to pay for electricity and gas get nothing. Its an odd situation. At least living in Scotland its warm this time of year and I can afford a bit of whisky since i saved on my fuel bill



The reason I'm posting this is because i think BG need to have another look at their scheme. I weigh 23 stone and i rarely slip through gaps in the system It just seems to me that a few people less fortunate than myself might end up doing so because of a simple case of a computer program saying no when the people who work with the scheme can see it should be saying yes.

rogerblack

Is there a time period over which this is assessed?
Is it plausible, for example, to submit a meter read now, and in a months time show you've used >40 quid or so of gas?

SwanJon

Try again, and make it clear that you are 'self-disconnecting', and cannot afford 10% of your income on energy.
Should be some wiggle room on this

Lucid74

Thanks for the replys and help, but to be honest I've got no interest in talking to BG anymore.

I've already been through an 8 month complaint process with BG they paid £35 compensation and then overbilled me 3 weeks later. Along with that i had a dispute with plusnet which was resolved in my favour and a lot of apologys when i made it clear i was going to the regulator. Finally i had hertz who took 3 months to repay me and e-bay/paypal which is looking like it will go to the financial services ombudsman. Add on to that a 2 year dispute which went to the parlimentary ombudsman. (started with a letter from BIS stating no fault of the government, ended with a letter of apology from a government department and the ombudsmans office saying we have no need to investigate because they said sorry. Very kind of them really i went from not missing a payment on anything in 10 years to probably being on a scottish trust deed by the spring because of the time/money they cost me). the funny thing is the first formal complaint i have made in my life was in August 2010 when i had finally had enough.


you know the great thing about having a job is all this kind of nonsense you can ignore because you can afford to. Why spend 1/4 of a year chasing £25 when you can earn that in a day.


Thought i might as well add a few more details as to my situation.

I moved into my rented property in January, the house is electric only. There was a pre-paid meter in place from the previous tenant on an economy 7 tariff. The sole form of heating in the house is storage heaters and the hot water comes from an immersion tank with an overnight timer on it.

I checked my electric usage with heaters on overnight and hot water to find i was using roughly £2.50 a day == £900 a year. Take. without the heaters and hot water the usage was roughly £300 a year. Take into account the winter/summer difference and over the last 20 years or so ive found £600 would be a reasonable annual usage.

Next i contacted BG and had the pre-paid meter taken out, i found those were a complete rip off back in the early 90's when i was a student. I requested to be switched to a single rate websaver 10 tariff on the simple grounds that without the heating on overnight its far cheaper to be on a standard single tier rate than an E7 rate, (storage heaters are as much a rip off as pre-paid meters assuming you can get GCH, though i admit they made economic sense back in the 70's)

It took BG one call and 2 weeks to change the meter, 4 months and 3 calls to change the tariff and 8 months 6 calls and 1 formal complaint to setup a direct debit. Personally i dont consider making a call once a month reminding them to do something they said they would do to be excessive.

They very kindly paid me £35 to cover the inconvience of their constant mistakes. then they mis-billed me causing me to go over my overdraft limit, cancelled my direct debit discount because i was in arrears, wouldn't accept meter readings over the internet (on an online account) on the grounds i have the wrong type of meter (which was put in at their request)

and the latest one is to enter my meter readings backwards because they couldnt believe my usage was so low and seem to assume i am on a E7 tariff rather than single rate. Due to the wrong meter they installed.


My current usage is 1500 KwH daytime, 600 KwH night. This is total usage since the first week of Febuary 2011 (its a bit higher as that reading was taken a couple of weeks ago when requested)

(E7 was 11p day and 4p night in January, websaver 8p (7.5p with discounts) so a single rate clearly made sense rather than E7)


Anyways all of that brought me onto the warm home discount scheme, i'd found about it by chance last year when i was looking things up for my mother whos 70+, ive arranged her fuel for the last few years (I switched her from BG maybe 4 years ago after she went with an online account and then she couldnt access it for 12 months so had no way of checking her fuel usage without going outside and reading the meters).

So phoning BG up to submit my meter readings i asked about the scheme and was surprised to find that the BG website says for people in my position

"Customer household has an annual income of less than £16,190 and spends 10% or more of their household annual income on fuel for adequate heating (usually 21 degrees for the main living room, and 18 degrees for other occupied rooms)."

however their systems and process ignore the adequate heating and just go off amount spent. Checked a bit more turns out that in order for BG to advertise the scheme they have to meet standards required by ofgem. I assume ofgem approved the bit about adequate heating and then BG decided not to implement if afterwards.

Which is why i suggest that those who understand this short post might be interested in contacting their MP/Ofgem. It seems to me that if you put in place a scheme with regulator support stating you will base elegibility off spending for adequate heating (not how much money you give BG) than thats what you do. I can imagine there are more than a few people in my situation who should qualify but dont. I can also imagine you might get some people who switch to BG because of this scheme and the information on the website only to find out they dont qualify after tying in to a 12 month contract or longer (scheme was only announced in April so that doesnt apply to me)



When you consider that for years its been possable to come up with figures for average spend, average usage by occupants and house type (uswitch showed this a decade ago and utiltiy compaines have used these methods to target advertising and make their profits for years) then BG have no excuss in claiming they cant work out an average cost for an average houshold in an average housing standard.

The system they have in place atm simply asked me whats your income then compared it with usage. in my case due to BG's mistakes on my account they intitally showed i had used 0 electricity, then they updated the figures and put them in backwards (hopefully on the right tariff but)



I have nothing but respect for the people who work at BG, though i might occasionally ask for a bit more competance. however this post has nothing to do with their standards or the fact i dont qualify for the payment. I just dont like things like this when a very rich company makes mistakes and erros and the people who pay for it are the ones who can least afford it.

Personally i hope to be back at work 12 months from now, i will no longer qualify for this scheme, which runs for another 4 years. If it wasn't for problems with the OU/YPLA and the PCDL scheme i would have been back at work 6 months ago and never known about it.