SSE - £150 + VAT (to deliver letter)

philD_2

Morning all

Got into debt with SSE (Southern & Scottish Energy) with Gas/Elec (out of work and claiming Income Support). Received a letter titled 'Warrant Action' through the letterbox. Top left of letter it says 'PLEASE NOTE YOU HAVE BEEN CHARGED A COLLECTIONS ADMIN FEE OF £75.00 EXCLUDING VAT FOR THIS VISIT (Charge applies to each utility supplied).

I queried the charges as follows:

[1] You haven't employed a collections agent to deal with my specific case - the collections agents are employed by you and form part of your company administration costs. Since administration costs form part of your billing and cost structure, how can you justify additional charges?

[2] If I were to have a single account with you (gas or elec) then the same visit would have been made and you would apply a charge of £75 (+ VAT) for this visit. However, as I have two accounts you apply two charges despite the fact that there is a single visit IE any costs to you are NOT twice as much.

and received the response:

You have advised your complaint is regarding the warrant charges being applied to both accounts, I can advise although in some cases one collection agent may complete the work, the collection cases are worked independently of one another as the status of each account can differ and for this reason the charges are also applied independently.

You have requested clarity as to why we administer additional charges to you in pursuit of monies outstanding, I have been informed by the Warrants department, this is due to the additional budgeting costs which have to be met to employ persons to act on their behalf.

So I Ask the same question and get a response:

You have previously asked for clarity of the charges and this has been provided to you in respect of the work undertaken in the pursuit of monies regarding your gas and electric accounts, which you do not dispute.

So, I write the following email 'I simply don't believe you can justify these charges - your document (your ref CC52/PWV) titled 'WARRANT ACTION' is not a legal document, it hasn't been signed, it has two contradicting dates (21/02/2013 & 04/03/2013) and is fraught with spelling mistakes. It was not possible for me to use the MCOL (HM Courts online) system to issue a summons to SSE as your headquarters are based in Scotland (Inveralmond House, 200 Dunkeld Road, Perth PH1 3AQ) and MCOL is only applicable in England and Wales.'

And get a response:

You have previously asked for clarity of the charges and this has been provided to you in respect of the work undertaken in the pursuit of monies regarding your gas and electric accounts, which you do not dispute.

So I look at gas bills based on Calorific Values (CV) and noted different CV values for the same street/address from different suppliers over the same charging period. These idiots are taking the Pi**. Please look at my next post.

victor2

philD wrote: »

So I look at gas bills based on Calorific Values (CV) and noted different CV values for the same street/address from different suppliers over the same charging period. These idiots are taking the Pi**. Please look at my next post.

Your main issue sounds like you've got into a mess by not discussing the situation with the supplier before it reached this stage.
There is no "next post" at this time, but your point about a different CV being used by different suppliers for the same billing period could be explained by the suppliers in question using a different mechanism for averaging out the CV over the period.
I looked into this carefully a couple of years back. I took the CV reported for my area by National Grid on a daily basis. I then averaged it out over an actual billing period and compared it to the figure suppliers had used (E.On and EDF in this case). Both suppliers used a figure slightly below my calculated value. In my cases 39.2 was used when the average was 39.51 and 39.2 against 39.47. The difference in cost was only pennies for a typical month's domestic use and in the customer's favour anyway, so I was happy to leave it at that.

Fire_Fox

It's not part of the company admin costs, otherwise the charges would be spread out between all users, making everyone pay more instead of just the bad debtors. You can often avoid these costs by keeping in regular contact with the supplier and making at least part payments each month. Find out if you fall into the 'vulnerable' category, you may be eligible for extra help http://www.sse.com/Community/VulnerableCustomers/

There are set amounts that can be charged in debt collecting/ by bailiffs, run an advanced search on the 'Debt Free Wannabe' board.

If you have less money coming in unfortunately you need to reduce your usage substantially so you can still afford to pay your bills, again you might be best posting a Statement of Affairs on DFW.
http://www.stoozing.com/msoc/soacalc.php

philD_2

The response from the Energy Ombudsman was:

The main issues of your complaint are about contractual and commercial issues which fall
outside the responsibility of the ombudsman so we are unable to help.
Energy companies operate within a set of rules which are put in place by the regulator, Ofgem. If
you feel that SSE is not complying with these rules, or that there are shortfalls in the regulatory
structure, you should contact Ofgem. Ofgem does not deal with individual complaints but will be
able to provide guidance on whether SSE is contravening any of its regulations. Visit Ofgem at
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk or call on 020 7901 7295.
As long as these rules are followed, companies are entitled to make decisions about the way
products or services are offered. For example, if a company decides to increase its prices or to
change a tariff structure, it is able to do so. The ombudsman cannot help with these issues.

philD_2

victor2

Thanks for your response regarding Calorific Value (CV) of gas as used when billing. You're correct, there is no 'next post' as I'm still collecting data. I'm not sure that I agree with your comment 'The difference in cost was only pennies for a typical month's domestic use and in the customer's favour anyway' - the bill is proportional to the CV stated and a simple difference of 1 dp (39.6, 39.7) represents approx 0.25% change which based on a £750 gas bill per year equates to approx £1.86. That's 4 cans of baked beans matey (lol)!:j

chanz4

4.5 If any payments are late we may charge you

(i) interest at the rate of 4% per annum above the

current Bank of England base rate and (ii) our

reasonable costs of trying to recover overdue

payments.



The costs will include a warrant application fee. also each fuel has a seperate engineer for warrants. P.S rights of entry act covers both

philD_2

chanz4

The costs will include a warrant application fee

Nope, have been charged £20 + VAT per utility supplied in ADDITION for the 'Warrant fee' - IE the legal process although when I requested a copy of the document they would not provide it: 'If you wish a copy of the Warrant which was obtained you would be required to contact the Court directly and incur any costs involved, unfortunately, we are not able to provide this to you directly.'

So my 'debt' has increased in total by approx £200.

Nada666

You must have had two quarters at least over which to come to some other arrangement. You chose not to repay over three or six months interest and penalty free. You chose not to request to repay over twelve months interest and penalty free. If that was still too high you could have requested to take as many years as you like to repay the arrears at £3.30 or thereabouts per week. Again interest and penalty free.

You chose to ignore all those opportunities and options and go down a more convoluted and expensive path. Why did you find none of the costs-free (to you) options attractive?

philD_2

Nada666

I guess we all find ourselves in difficult situations at times? Hopefully, I'm not alone!

Fire_Fox

philD wrote: »

Nada666

I guess we all find ourselves in difficult situations at times? Hopefully, I'm not alone!

Yes, and there are systems in place to accommodate that. If you fail to communicate with the supplier, fail to make regular payments even at a reduced rate you will end up with debt collectors and additional charges. It's not SSE's job to give everyone who ignores their letters, continues to use energy and skips payment the benefit of the doubt, they'd quickly go bankrupt if they did. You have got income, you should have been making payments whilst substantially reducing your energy use.

If you head over to DFW board you will see a Statement of Affairs and token monthly payments are standard practice even when setting up a Debt Management Plan, this demonstrates willingness to meet your obligations even if not the means. Also that it is recommended to pay whatever you offer/ can afford according to your SoA regardless of whether this payment plan is accepted by the creditor. This helps avoid extra charges being added, sometimes interest is frozen.

HTH.

philD_2

Fire Fox

Thanks for your advice. I have already setup a payment plan with SSE however my point (at the start of the thread) was the £75 + VAT PER utility charges (approx £200) applied to my account. You don't seem to address this in your post - this is why I'm not happy with SSE and was my initial reason for challenging SSE. SSE is simply a service provider - nothing more.

The energy ombudsman has been contacted and I've included their reply in the thread. If/should other existing avenues of complaint prove fruitless then I'll personally visit SSE directors at their home.