MSE News: Ebico hikes some customers’ bills by £100/year

MSE_Andrew

Energy supplier Ebico is ending its variable, zero-standing charge tariff, and moving all 46,000 customers on it to a higher priced deal – blaming Ofgem’s incoming price cap for the move...

Read the full story:
'Ebico hikes some customers’ bills by £100/year'

Click reply below to discuss. If you haven’t already, join the forum to reply.

Merlin139

Not the end of the world.

Plenty of comparison sites to use that will show them where to get another deal.

EachPenny

It would be really helpful to forum members if you'd placed far more emphasis on this bit of the article:-

The supplier still offers a zero standing charge tariff – called Ebico Zero Green Fixed v2 – though it’s a more expensive fixed tariff. However, it has no exit fees – so it’s largely the same as Ebico Zero, apart from the price.

But that's far less dramatic than talking about customer's bills being "hiked" by "£100/year".

silverwhistle

As people on this tariff will be low users the impact of a standing charge is huge and getting a different supplier is not a particularly helpful suggestion if they all have SCs too.



For me it is just still worthwhile to go the SC free route and the increase will be 24.7% for electricity and 19.65% for gas. If my GF ever moved in I'd need to review again as increased usage might make it worthwhile to select a tariff with a SC.

Ilona

Good grief Andrew, keep up, there is already a thread on this. They wont be moving all 46,000 customers on to a higher price deal, your headline is scaremongering. Admitted the cost per kWh will go up, but there is still the option of moving to the Zero Green tariff with no standing charge.

I have chosen to stay on the Ebico Zero, I expect a small price increase, but it will still be cheaper for me as a low user, than going down the standing charge route.

ilona

wavelets

For the last 6-8 weeks, Ebico had been offering a fixed tariff called Ebico Zero Green Fixed (i.e. not V2)

This was priced exactly the same as Ecico Zero, but was fixed for 12 months, but had no early exit fees.

Indeed, Ebico wrote to all their customers at the beginning of September, and it was in that email



As MSE has been banging on since I can't remember to 'grab a fix' because prices were going up, some suppliers had already announced their 3rd price rise this year!, and recently I saw an MSE article saying cheap fixes were being pulled (I think it was suggested that the price of the cheapest fix had gone up by about £150 over less than a month), I took the opportunity to secure the cheap fixed tariff from Ebico whilst it was going.
(at least for any account I actually pay Ebico anything)

:money:

Sadly, Ebico pulled the cheap fix, and launched the more expensive v2 fix the day they made the announcement that they were pulling Ebico Zero at the end of November.

Mee

The lack of notice is totally unacceptable. I received no communication from Ebico until 08:00 this morning, and certainly no letter or email in September. My Ebico communications dashboard (which I have screen grabbed) lists this mornings communication as 21/10/2018, and nothing pertaining to this price hike. My tariff has already changed to Standard.

I clearly took my eye off the ball, but I am not accepting this without a fight.

wavelets

Mee wrote: »

The lack of notice is totally unacceptable. I received no communication from Ebico until 08:00 this morning, and certainly no letter or email in September. My Ebico communications dashboard (which I have screen grabbed) lists this mornings communication as 21/10/2018, and nothing pertaining to this price hike. My tariff has already changed to Standard.

I clearly took my eye off the ball, but I am not accepting this without a fight.

:huh:

You received notice at 08:00h on 24-Oct-2018

You are entitled to 30 days notice of any adverse changes to your agreement

The adverse changes mentioned in the OP come into force on Thursday 29th November 2018

You may have noticed a change of tariff name within your online account, but if you go 'My Account' within your online account, you will see details of your current tariff. Hopefully the prices currently remain as per what your Ebico Zero tariff were.

If not, I suggest you contact the supplier and raise a complaint in line with the supplier's complaint procedure.

Edit: In regards your non-receipt of an email in early September, please check your spam folder.
The message was sent by email only and is titled "Have you logged into your online account recently? Things have changed."
It is not in your online account communications.

I have control of a number of independent Ebico accounts, and this message was received for all accounts I control (i.e. to all differing email addresses)

Again, if you really do find no evidence that this email was sent to you, I suggest you complain about that as it would seem unusual that you were left out of this apparent mass emailing of Ebico customers.

Mee

Thanks for this.
Please can you confirm whether your September communications appears on your Comms dashboard?

I check my Spam folder every time I login in and save all communications. However, I remember never receiving the Ebico SSE letter back in 2017 and never received an explanation from them as to why I was not on the transition database.

Nevertheless when such a fundamental change is planned/made is it reasonable to advertise it with the subject line: "Have you logged into your online account recently? Things have changed."
This to me would suggest a website change - something cosmetic rather than a tariff change.