Scottish Power overcharged me £1300 and are evading making a refund

cajef

spcustomer wrote: »

A great amount of it is just twaddle designed to obscure reality.

Well at last you have got around to admitting it.

spcustomer

(Bluebirdman, why do you keep coming back then?)

An interesting turn of events has now occurred. My place is not just a house but a smallholding. There are about a dozen telegraph poles on which Scottish Power hang their cables on my land. I am sure you will have guessed that Scottish Power have not paid any rent on them for years.

An email from a contractor came the other day. It said (I am copying and pasting):

Hello,
I work on behalf of Scottish Power surveying power lines in North Wales. I have identified trees that could do with pruning at the above property. The work will be done by Scottish Power at no expense to the property owner.
Would it be possible to confirm this e mail is to the owner or could my details be passed on.

Many Thanks.
(contractor)

To which I have replied:


Dear (contractor)

Thanks for your email. I am the owner of the property.

Please tell Scottish Power that when they have paid all rents up to date, disconnected the power from my house and refunded all overcharges to date I will be happy to allow this work - more so if the prunings be left near the road, where I can easily pick them up for firewood.


Yours


(spcustomer)

That reply went out on the 12th February by email. SP have not made any move at all as far as I know. They certainly have not contacted me in any way.

spcustomer

It may by now have become obvious to most readers that MSE is not so much a consumer site as a marketing site, and as any correspondent can have as many user names as they want, all a not too scrupulous trader has to do in the event of negative reports is to use his or her various names to either confuse or defuse the issue.

What interests me about the various names who have posted in this thread is that there is more than one literary style amongst them, so they are not all David. Some writings are not too bright, some are abvously trying to obscure, some are evidently trying to be irritating (it still helps to obscure), some are patronising, some are trying to sound knowing and intelligent but so full of pretense so that they seem somewhat thick and almost ridiculous. So there must be at least two writers other than SP's David and me - and conceivably 90% of the posts are various SP people.

We will never know unless SP suddenly and miraculously decide on a policy of honesty and openness.

Bluebirdman_of_Alcathays

spcustomer wrote: »

It may by now have become obvious to most readers that MSE is not so much a consumer site as a marketing site, and as any correspondent can have as many user names as they want, all a not too scrupulous trader has to do in the event of negative reports is to use his or her various names to either confuse or defuse the issue.

What interests me about the various names who have posted in this thread is that there is more than one literary style amongst them, so they are not all David. Some writings are not too bright, some are abvously trying to obscure, some are evidently trying to be irritating (it still helps to obscure), some are patronising, some are trying to sound knowing and intelligent but so full of pretense so that they seem somewhat thick and almost ridiculous. So there must be at least two writers other than SP's David and me - and conceivably 90% of the posts are various SP people.

We will never know unless SP suddenly and miraculously decide on a policy of honesty and openness.

Hi spcustomer (nice to see you back!)

Just to reassure you, I'm not, never have been, and doubt I ever will be one of the "SP people".

Kindest Regards,
BBM

edit: I try to give people constructive advice on here, some like it, some don't. I advised you months ago to take them to court (which would be unlikely if I were an "SP people"!). Have you done it yet?

Hoof_Hearted

I'm disappointed. I thought this thread would end with spcustomer being sectioned.

spcustomer

Hoof-hearted: Pourquoi les sabot? Je comprends pas.

ScottishPower
Cathcart Business Park
Spean Street
Glasgow
G44 4BE


24 March 2015


Your ref. ******** and my address.

Legal Notice


Electricity at this address and other matters.

In 2004 or thereabouts I caught your firm overcharging by the simple process of charging the daytime rate for night-time electricity. You responded very quickly, telling me that you had overcharged my by £1300 and that you would send me a cheque refunding this sum. You then sent me a cheque for £300 and I complained, asking you to account for why this should be. You said that the other £1000 was due for some other reason but have never offered any accounts to show why.

My response was to stop paying my bills until I had paid you £1000 short of the bills allegedly due, (see correspondence in your files) after which I made a standing order for the sum quoted by your representative Linda Jones as appropriate for a house like mine (£500 pa) in monthly instalments.

You then ignored my actions and started adding random extra charges claiming that they were due because I was in debt to your firm.

Over the years you have made numerous adjustments to the alleged arrears but have never provided any proper accounts to justify that £1000, or any other charges at any other time.

Two years ago, without due course of law, you sent men to my house carrying what must have been a forged warrant of entry, who fitted a prepayment meter. I asked them to instead cut off the electricity but they refused.This meter is a tremendous nuisance to me, makes unpleasant noises from time to time, and is preventing me easily installing an alternative supply system. I have never paid a penny into that meter, and never intend to. I have asked you to remove it and cut off the power a few times since.

You then (quite recently) sent me an upbeat notice telling me that the previous year my electricity came to about £200, thereby admitting that you have been overcharging me from the very beginning - not necessarily by just £300 per annum, but by as yet undetected sums. This, I must now preume, has been going on since your firm first took over from MANWEB (I was the owner at that time and the electricity was paid by members of my family), and will therefore be a very large sum indeed. I understand from the police that fraud is not covered by the Statute of Limitation. At present I do not know how long you have had control of MANWEB's accounts, but believe that we must be looking at a sum of more than £300 per annum ever since that takeover date if index-linked.

During recent years I revealed to the public what you had been doing on a website called Moneysavingexpert.com, on which your firm allegedly have representation and the ability to edit posts. I asked your alleged MSE rep to supply certain earlier SP email addresses so that I could easily find some earlier email correspondence. Whilst saying publicly that you would do this you have failed to supply all of them. You have done likewise with presenting accounts, so that you really seem to have no case at all from a financial standpoint.

What I now require is that you do the following:

1 Provide full accounts justifying all charges since your takeover from MANWEB.

2. Refund all overcharges (with interest) from the takeover date.

3 Disconnect your supply from my house and remove all SP equipment and fittings from my house.

4. Apply to the county court to have all records of debts alleged by your firm to be owed by me to you removed from the records

5. Compensate me for the frustration and discomfort and inconvenience I have endured and continue to endure as a result of your actions.

6. Stop harrassing me over alleged arrears

7. Keep proper accounts.

8. Clearly print Scottish Power's postal address on all documents demanding money from any person This is something you have failed to do on some alleged accounts sent to me.

I imagine other matters will arise in due course.

I notice that I have already asked you to do most of these things before, but you do not seem to have done anything at all about it.
Your failure to act appropriately after this letter will lead as soon as possible to legal action. I will need to use lawyers and so will ask for costs.

There is, in addition to this present matter, the matter of rent on telegraph poles installed on my land, but I think this might be better dealt with separately. I will consult lawyers about that.


Yours



(spcustomer)

spcustomer

We've been here before.

It can be quite exasperating how unaware Scottish Power are of the hardship and irritation they are inflicting on people - or perhaps they are aware and do not care?

You could, on the basis of past performance, expect SP's response to my 'Legal notice' would be to ignore it - but they haven't quite.

I imagine it would be entirely predictable to people who know about these things, but to me it was not.

They have tried to take the whole thing back to the beginning by sending me a letter telling me of their 'complaints procedure' - which, of course, as we have already found, is another way of doing nothing. I have already complained many times, and they have admitted that. How I do it is my choice. I would publish their letter, but it adds nothing.

So, SP, my complaints all still apply, and I am not really interested in what your 'complaints procedure' is. Do try to take that in.

From a legal point of view, one must ask: How many times must one complain before one is deemd to have complained?

The whole thing is getting pretty stressful. Are they hoping that I will die and then they can just pick up their unlawful charges on the winding up of my estate?

Do they not think I have a family who will almost certainly pursue them after my death if I do die before it is resolved?

System

Life is just too short for this sort of constant rambling. You are not going to get a resolution by posting on MSE. If you have a genuine case with supporting documentation, then stop threatening SP and just take them to Court. You can then enjoy the rest of your life spending the considerable damages that you believe you are entitled to!

shammyjack

shammyjack wrote: »

Far too early for a tortoise to be waking out of hibernation . Pull your neck back in and go back to sleep until at least May !

It is still only April spcustomer ! Go back to hibernation like a good lad !

spcustomer

There may be one or two people who actually take this matter seriously rather than thinking of it as a way of trying to make someone feel inadequate and thereby making themselves feel better, and indeed I have read a few on this thread. For those people here is an update:

I have written my statement of case and witness statement and am filling in the county court paperwork. Because it is impossible to calculate how much SP owe me I am suing for £6025 on the basis of a very rough estimate. It is probably far too little but anything would be better than nothing.

But much more important - I am also asking the court to make an injunction requiring SP to disconnect all their stuff and stop pestering me.