Scottish Power HUGE backbill on final bill - help!

raha

Hi all,

I’m in a stressful situation and could do with some advice. I recently changed energy provider because my monthly payments were so high with Scottish Power. I live in a top floor two bedroom flat, with another professional- we both work 5 days a week for long hours, and we both regularly travel or stay over at our SO’s flats, so in short we are both hardly ever there. It seemed ludicrous to me that I was being charged in the region of £117-£143 every month for energy payments. But nonetheless, this continued until I eventually made the call to switch providers. After doing so, I have received a huge final bill of £356 – this made absolutely no sense to me. After lots of difficulty in trying to understand this, and lots of back and forth, I finally realized that the reason for the charge is because they have BACKBILLED me for the last TWO YEARS, and they decided that their initial estimates were too low. This is something I am now contesting, on two grounds: I moved in April 2017 and I never gave an initial metre reading. My landlord didn’t provide me with a key to the gas metre and I didn’t know to chase it up, only until MARCH 2019 when I managed to locate and access the gas metre. That is when I gave my first actual reading. So, are they actually able to claim that I used a certain amount of energy without an initial reading? From April 2017-March 2019 I was billed on estimates – which were quite lumpy payments every month. Now, I since I gave a reading in March 2019, suddenly I have landed this debt. I knew I was overpaying anyway, so now they are claiming I should have paid even more?? Is this actually possible? Without an initial reading?
Secondly, I am contesting that they surely can’t back-bill for over 12 months as it breaches the code that I have recently read up about when I did some googling. I don’t even live with the same person as I used to share the bills with anymore, so I can’t go back and ask my former flatmate for money now. I had set up a direct debit in good faith that I am paying the full amount of my energy payments each month.

Would appreciate some guidance on this. I lodged a complaint (again), with SP, hoping I get some resolution on the matter this time around, but I’m really stressing out and it’s making me super anxious.

Thanks for reading!

Robin9

What does your your very first bill from SP give as an opening reading - does that say E, C or A.

How did SP know you were the tenant ? Did you ring them when you moved in.

raha

So ironically despite the fact the backbilling going back two years, on my SP account I'm not able to even see further back 12 months of bills when I log into my account! So I haven't been able to locate my very first bill.
I may have a paper copy in storage still, I have to check. The last bill I can see online was from May 2018, and it has an E on it.
When I moved in, SP were already the providers, so I just called them up to say I'd moved in and made an online account.

Robin9

raha wrote: »

.....
When I moved in, SP were already the providers, so I just called them up to say I'd moved in and made an online account.

So you were probably on a Standard (ie expensive ) tariff which didn't help.

PennineAcute

Back billing would only apply if you could prove that you have done all that is reasonably possible for you to enable SP to produce an accurate bill.