British Gas are refusing to credit an overcharge

Boxman

I switched suppliers away from British Gas when my tariff came to an end at the end of February the actual switch taking place on the 14th March. The meter readings have been agreed between all parties but as others have posted on here a few times, BG have incorrectly charged all March usage at Standard tariff rates rather than given that they knew I was switching, in line with their terms and conditions the rates effective before the end of February should still apply. After a couple of e-mails back and forwards BG agreed with my assertion and that a mistake had been made. I was told in an e-mail that whilst d/d payments totalling £46 for March usage at Standard rates would be taken by the end of March, my bank account would be immediately be credited by an appropriate sum (which I calculate to be about £17.50) to correct the billing error.

BG have taken the payment as they said they would but no credit has been paid back. I have obviously queried this by e-mail with the BG representative who has now replied stating that “Our Billing team has advised us not to apply any credit on the account for such issues. We were expecting the credit to be applied automatically within 14 days. As this has not happened, we've forwarded your account details to our National Helpdesk team to look into the matter. I'm sorry, I'll have to wait for their reply in this matter.”

To my mind this is not good enough. The matter is simple, the facts and the numbers are not in dispute, they made an error but now appear to be backtracking on their promise to fix matters. OK the numbers are not that large but the credit is definitely due. Any suggestions as to what to do next would be welcomed.

boo_star

It seems to me that policy is not to manually apply credits in case the system automatically does it so they're not left chasing people for the money they overpaid to them.

And the rest of their reply appears to amount to "another department deals with this not us so you'll have to wait for them to do something."

It certainly doesn't read as "we're not giving you your money back, go fish."