Scottish Power "Final Bill"

DeborahSt

Hello everyone,


I had quite a large debt with Scottish Power, and had a prepayment meter installed. I finally paid off the debt about 2 years ago (whoop!) at which point the meter stopped taking the repayment charge (I gather they update via signal through the key).


I moved out of the house in September 2016 leaving £10 in credit on the meter.


I received a final bill for nearly £2000.00! I called them to say obviously this was impossible, as I had paid off my debt and I was paying for my supply as I went along... Pay as you go! How could I possibly owe them money?


They said they would look into it and get back to me. I heard nothing, then received an email, telling me I needed to pay or they would send it to a debt collector. I logged on to my account, now to find the "debt" was a little under £3000.00. Called them again, explained it all again, and the said they would get back to me.


Heard nothing, same process - another collections letter so I called again (this was now January 2017) Spoke to a very nice lady who seemed to know what she was doing. She said it seemed that my meter was on the wrong rate & they had retrospectively charged me. I explained to her that I had numerous conversations every time the guys came to read the meter, as they could never find a reading for "rate 2", because I didn't have one. She told me that she would have to forward it to a different department as she couldn't access anything that far back (to 2004) and someone would call me back...


I've just received yet another "pay or else" email, but now bill is dated 25th January 2017 and it's for £1796.80, which is showing as a carried forward figure, but doesn't say where it was carried forward from!


This is now the only bill that is available, as all the others have vanished from my online account...


I'm really at my wits end & feel so sick. This is literally the one bill I managed to pay off completely and now they're saying I owe them money. Needless to say, I didn't get a call back & don't know what to do next as the calls don't seem to get me anywhere.


Any thoughts or suggestions please?

footyguy

DeborahSt wrote: »

Hello everyone,


I had quite a large debt with Scottish Power, and had a prepayment meter installed. I finally paid off the debt about 2 years ago (whoop!) at which point the meter stopped taking the repayment charge (I gather they update via signal through the key).


I moved out of the house in September 2016 leaving £10 in credit on the meter.


I received a final bill for nearly £2000.00! I called them to say obviously this was impossible, as I had paid off my debt and I was paying for my supply as I went along... Pay as you go! How could I possibly owe them money?


They said they would look into it and get back to me. I heard nothing, then received an email, telling me I needed to pay or they would send it to a debt collector. I logged on to my account, now to find the "debt" was a little under £3000.00. Called them again, explained it all again, and the said they would get back to me.


Heard nothing, same process - another collections letter so I called again (this was now January 2017) Spoke to a very nice lady who seemed to know what she was doing. She said it seemed that my meter was on the wrong rate & they had retrospectively charged me. I explained to her that I had numerous conversations every time the guys came to read the meter, as they could never find a reading for "rate 2", because I didn't have one. She told me that she would have to forward it to a different department as she couldn't access anything that far back (to 2004) and someone would call me back...


I've just received yet another "pay or else" email, but now bill is dated 25th January 2017 and it's for £1796.80, which is showing as a carried forward figure, but doesn't say where it was carried forward from!


This is now the only bill that is available, as all the others have vanished from my online account...


I'm really at my wits end & feel so sick. This is literally the one bill I managed to pay off completely and now they're saying I owe them money. Needless to say, I didn't get a call back & don't know what to do next as the calls don't seem to get me anywhere.


Any thoughts or suggestions please?

Post a legible copy of the bill here (remove personal info, etc) and perhaps someone can assist you.

Without seeing the bill, we would just be guessing what it realtes to.

Or take it to the CAB

Scientomology

I have also gotten a very confusing bill I cannot make sense of where Scottish seem to have taken a larger than normal amount and put the account in debt, despite there having been nearly £500 credit less than a month ago.

I'm going to post a new thread to get some help. Wish you the best of luck sorting your nightmare situation out! :eek:

Scottish_Power

Hi DeborahSt,

Could you possibly please send an email to [EMAIL="social@scottishpower.com"]social@scottishpower.com[/EMAIL] including the address or account number this matter relates to? I can then arrange to get this looked into for you.

Kind regards
Faye

dogshome

At a guess when your Standard meter was swapped for a PAYGO due to debt,
Scot Power ,who are not the sharpest knife in the box on accounting, failed to register the change across all their systems and also failed to notify the Regional Data base for your address.

You really need some sort of evidence you were making payments to feed a PAYGO meter, hopefully you did this by D/Card or C/card and getting a record from the providers from last November shouldn't be too difficult

DeborahSt

Hi All,


Just thought I would give you an update on this situation.


Scottish Power continued to ignore all my phone calls, did not respond to any of my emails, then last week I got a letter from debt collector, who added another £548 to the bill! I called them and advised of he problem, they very kindly agreed to put it on hold for 30 days.


I then called Scottish power (again) and ran through the entire sorry tale. They said they would investigate & get back to me within 5 days (same response as always) Thi time though, I said if I hadn't heard back within5 days, I would go to the ombudsman. They said could I give them 10 days? Ok, but on the 10th day if I hadn't heard back, I will be contacting the Ombudsman. That was last Friday.


Yesterday (Monday) Scottish Power called me, explained that it was an error & no, I don't owe them anything!!


I really didn't follow what the guy said, but the gist of it was, when I moved from the property they still had me down as having a 2 rate meter (even though the meter only provided 1 rate) so they backdated an estimated charge on 30,000 units for a phantom 2 rate charge.


It's taken 5 months for me to get to this point, with so many calls and my time spent on the phone, but at least I've got to the bottom of it - clearly the suggestion of involving the Ombudsman actually pushed them into action.

DeborahSt

Hello Faye,


I'm sorry I missed your message. I wish I had seen it before!


Hopefully (5 months on) the matter has been resolved, but I'm really not happy about the way I was ignored.


Even the debt collector said I must owe the money, otherwise they wouldn't have been sent the case! Made me feel really awful

Scottish_Power

DeborahSt wrote: »

Hello Faye,


I'm sorry I missed your message. I wish I had seen it before!


Hopefully (5 months on) the matter has been resolved, but I'm really not happy about the way I was ignored.


Even the debt collector said I must owe the money, otherwise they wouldn't have been sent the case! Made me feel really awful

Hi DeborahSt,

I'm sorry to hear of the length of time it has taken for this matter to be resolved.

Please accept my apologies for the poor customer service that you have experienced and for any inconvenience and frustration that has been caused. This is not the standard of service we wish our customers to experience and I am really sorry that you were affected by this.

If you would like me to look into this further for you, please send your account number to the email address in my previous message.

Kind regards
Faye

dogshome

Glad what was a BIG worry is now settled.
Just a bit concerned that it was all done over the phone - No written record - and this is SP who's history is littered with one person saying one thing, whilst another member of staff does something else

Advise that you Email Faye thanking her for offer of assistance and setting out the history of this saga, and it's conclusion.
If SP don't reply with a rejection of your history, this way you have a written record should it arise again