Switched from Coop in February - Just had HUGE final bill!

undaunted

Cardew wrote: »

However as you state in post#9:

With the frequent switching of accounts it is very difficult for suppliers to get a new customer's history of consumption, and most tend to set the initial DD too low in order to entice new customers.

I have often thought it would be an idea for the losing company to give that history to the gaining supplier(with the customer's permission of course).

Whilst I appreciate the logic in that do you think they'd necessarily want it? IE Luring people in with an ostensibly good monthly payment may benefit the supplier - and certainly their sales teams. Once the debt is there the customer then either pays it off or is locked in by a transfer objection if unable to do so.

Seems like a potential win win for the supplier to me - at least in the short term which may well be as far as they sometimes seem to think

modsandmockers

Cardew wrote: »

I have often thought it would be an idea for the losing company to give that history to the gaining supplier (with the customer's permission of course)

They don't seem to need the customer's permission to wreck the customer's finances and credit history etc by failing to take such obvious and simple commonsense steps!

System

Cardew wrote: »

I have often thought it would be an idea for the losing company to give that history to the gaining supplier(with the customer's permission of course).

The history of energy usage for every property sits with the data collectors. An Estimated Annual Consumption (EAC) for electricity and Annual Quantity (AQ) for gas are passed to the new supplier on switch. The EAC is updated with each actual meter reading and the AQ is updated annually. Some suppliers make it very clear in their ts and cs that they ignore the projected readings given to them by the customer and use the EAC and AQ. Others just seem to make it up based on average energy usage.

The problem of ever changing DDs has got worse as a result of Ofgem demanding that credit balances are re-paid at annual review. The law of unforeseen consequences.

modsandmockers

On another thread, Bark01 told us that "Bad debt generally adds 5-8% onto everyones bills".

I wonder how much of this bad debt could be avoided simply by clearly explaining to consumers that they need to provide monthly meter readings in the same way that they need to facilitate weekly rubbish collection.