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British Gas Complaint
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So I thought I'd give you an update because things just seemingly get worse with BG... Having accepted the back dated tariff and expecting a £58.68 reduction I end up with what appears to be a £40ish increase so nearly £100 more on the account than I was expecting to see plus they increased my monthly payments again to cover this. Looking at their app it shows all my bills have been reversed back to Jan 21st 2019, removing £2020.35 and then billing us for £2325.35 as the new tariff calculates what we should have paid. We were 8 days shy of the next bill being put onto our account so the £305 increase I assumed was due to this. After using their website to calculate what they say we've been billed for I can only see £265ish worth of usage to cover the unbilled period. Contacted BG to ask for an explanation only to be told that our original tariff (i.e. the temporary one) may have been cheaper than the fixed one they moved us to "at times". So I'm now confused as to why they thought there was a £58.68 saving by doing this... Just to really hammer home how inept they are the £2325.35 bill has since also been reversed on my account so I'm now sitting with over £2k of credit that may or may not be automatically refunded to me at some point that they will probably demand back if anyone is paying attention. It's very tempting to switch now and see if they refund it or just leave it be but I know I still owe them something.
Does anyone think that going to the Ombudsman with this is a good idea now?0 -
Garret80 said:Thanks for the input, the problem I've had is that all of the listed grumbles have a knock on effect. So the reminder arrives 10 days before Xmas. Gets over looked and the January bill leads us to think we're in an ok position.
Also you need to really sort out the management of your emails if they get overlooked; i always read all my emails as they arrive or schedule a reminder at a point in the future when i can spend time to action it so none ever get overlooked.
So when your originally took out the tariff you were told when it would end, you had an email telling you when it would end 7 weeks before AND it would show on your bills that the price has changed so you had three chances to do something about but failed, yet you somehow think it's not your fault?2 -
Garret80 said:I need some advice as I’m at a fork in the road with a complaint I’ve made with British Gas and need to make a decision on what to do next. We fell £350 into arrears with BG over 2019 by trying to pay a balanced monthly figure to cover our yearly costs and stop the payments yoyoing between summer and winter as they were all over the place previously. We believe we’ve been misled about the state of our account, meaning we didn't switch at various points when we should have, which has in effect caused the scale of the arrears as costs ended up being 32% higher than 2018 whilst our usage reduced slightly.
I’ll admit upfront that the initial failure in this was ours because we overlooked the email they sent to us (7 weeks) before they automatically switched us to a temporary tariff, once the 2018 MSE all online deal ended in Jan 2019. I’d argue that it was sent too early to be a reminder (the one for the 15 month "temporary" tariff ending that we moved onto arrived 4 weeks before in comparison) but I’m not sure how effective it would be? It seems that we went from the best deal to the worst without realising but believe we’ve been given misleading information about our account, as follows, so were oblivious that we should be looking to switch.- Conflicting information on the Jan 2019 bill 10 days before the tariff ended. In their "Could you pay less?" section it says we’re on the cheapest similar and overall tariff, without stating it was coming to an end in 10 days.
- No letter informing us that the price cap was increasing in April and we’d be affected by it. They claim it was sent in February but nothing was received.
- Their website doesn’t sync tariff and payment details correctly. Whilst calculating a change to the payment amount there is a period where the previous amount is still shown, but with it is an indication of whether you’re plan is on target and that is based on the new calculation. We’ve got screenshots of the same thing happening from this year where we're in arrears and the payments show the same amount we set them at through 2019 but the plan says we're on track.
- One bill informing us of a payment increase states we’ve used more energy than expected to justify the increase when our usage was nearly identical from the previous year and doesn’t mention cost increases due to the change in tariff.
- Having reduce our payments twice in 2019 due to the above making us think we were paying too much, we don't understand why we weren’t challenged by the BG “advisors” that we’d spoken to. Given that we were on a temporary tariff there was no mention that it might be worth checking our account, switching tariff or checking the cost of our usage before doing this as it would leave us in arrears. In fact both agreed with our assessment of stopping the yoyoing payments and were happy to reduce them.
Am I being naïve to think that the misleading information may get us anything more than is already on offer? I’m not looking for the whole amount to be cleared just a little more to acknowledge that we could have saved more by switching to something better, even with them through MSE. Given that it is our responsibility to manage our account are we quite lucky to even be offered that in the first place or is there something in what I’ve said that the ombudsman would pick up on? My worry from reading others experiences of the ombudsman is that they may not pay our situation much attention if it isn’t necessarily a black and white billing case and would side with BG given the initial error on our part.
We're certainly far better informed now having gone through this as to how the tariff determines the rates for your usage and where to find all of the relevant information within BG systems so this certainly won't ever happen again but it seems bizarre that someone has to go through this to understand it. We were also surprised to learn that the payment plan which determines your monthly payments is unrelated to your tariff for how long they run for, which has boggled the mind to some degree when trying to do a comparison with other services to understand the process, i.e. phone contracts. Really if I could enforce it upon them I'd like them to fix their systems and the misleading information that meant we missed further chances to switch but I suspect that may be beyond anyone's reach. Any and all advice welcome.Regards,
Money Saver1
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