British Gas, Credit check!

sarabop

Hi,
Before I do anymore I wonder if anyone else has been in the same boat? Ive purchased a repossessed house, the gas and electric meters are both prepay with British Gas. I called them today with the plan of getting regular meters installed. Not as easy as I assumed, first I needed a credit check - which I have failed! (can easily get a mortgage though?!) I now will need to try to find another supplier and maybe go through another credit check. Also means I cant use the cashback sites which I love to do :-(
Any tips would be welcome. The meters are now both usable and in my name on their standard tariffs
Thanks

Snakey

Same thing happened to me, apparently I failed because I was not on the electoral roll at the new address - which I would have thought would have been obvious given that that's updated once a month and I'd only moved in a few days earlier. They said that it would be... I don't remember now, either 60 days or 90 days, before I could apply with them again.

I remember being pretty annoyed at the time because the woman on the phone, nice as she was, must do this every day and she must have known that there was no way a new occupant could ever pass the credit check. (I know now too, of course, but I didn't know it then.) So why encourage me to do it there and then, rather than waiting a few weeks?

So I changed supplier, back to the one I'd used in the previous place - the reason being, they didn't need to credit-check me as I had a solid record with them, and they were happy to swap out the meters free of charge.

Check the T&C's carefully about getting a refund of any credit on those meters when you change supplier. You have to give them advance notice. I got caught out by not doing that.

sarabop

thanks for your reply.
It really helped. I remembered I used to be with EDF so called them up and they have set the changes in process, no credit checks and no problems. PHEW!!