URGENT - Liberty 100 Smart Meter Problem

MWT

LeesArt said:

I can't believe they have pulled this stunt so quickly.
Previous Tenant was on Monthly Tariff, HA take it for the Void, New supplier makes it a Pay as you go.
I will never get a smart meter
Here you have a vulnerable person and they are treated like a thief, they will never cope with whole top up thing.

Keep in mind that this is not personal, they have no idea who is living at the property as you've not yet contacted them and told them so they are not doing this to annoy you or disrespect your niece.

Once you so make contact make sure you have them put your niece  on their Priority Services Register.

If you are looking for someone to blame it is probably the Housing Association as if they left the energy company hanging without taking over the account, that will be the direct cause of where you find yourself now.

Also the blessing of the Smart Meter is that it can just as easily be swithched back to a credit meter if your niece passes the credit check...

LeesArt

It has been a nightmare, still not connected. 
Worst Service I have ever seen in my life
Call Centre in South Africa, following scripts, "We have a process and that falls outside our process so we can't help you"
One thing I wlll make sure is that the energy supplier is changed
I will never have a smart meter, she has not even moved in and they have cut off supply.
What a welcome.

LeesArt

MWT said:

Keep in mind that this is not personal, they have no idea who is living at the property as you've not yet contacted them and told them so they are not doing this to annoy you or disrespect your niece.

Once you so make contact make sure you have them put your niece  on their Priority Services Register.

If you are looking for someone to blame it is probably the Housing Association as if they left the energy company hanging without taking over the account, that will be the direct cause of where you find yourself now.

Also the blessing of the Smart Meter is that it can just as easily be swithched back to a credit meter if your niece passes the credit check...

Well now it IS personal.
No I can't blame the HA
The HA did put it in their own energy company 
I am trying to find out who transferred it away from them to this awful company.
I checked the rates on the meter and they are exorbitant, way above what I pay even with service charge.
They have some chicken and egg system for putting her on a Priority Service Register, they want her to call, she has no clue about this stuff.
BLESSING of a smart meter, are you kidding,  before smart meters people had 90 days from moving in before they had to think about a bill.  They were never cut off before they moved in and now you say she has to pass a credit check, for a basic need, energy.
This is so disgusting I do not have words.

Gerry1

Which energy company is it?  There's not much point in talking to a call centre drone, you need to escalate it.  Ask about emergency reconnections or whatever.

Failing that, send an email to their CEO whose details can probably be found at the ceoemail website.  Keep it simple, don't rant, don't give them your life story, just say that you need to make a card payment and get connected immediately.

MWT

LeesArt said:

Well now it IS personal.
No I can't blame the HA
The HA did put it in their own energy company 
I am trying to find out who transferred it away from them to this awful company.

Was there a letting agent involved in this at any point?

If the HA did transfer the account to a different energy company it should still be there, but if they appointed an agent to handle the property for them then many of them will transfer the account to one of the providers that pay a 'commission' to them from the excessive costs that they charge, Spark Energy would be an example of that...

Personally I don't recall ever having 90 days before worrying about a bill, I've always taken care of that on the day I moved in and that had nothing to do with Smart meters.

It sounds like someone with the ability to make changes has messed this up for her by moving the account somewhere that rewards them for doing that and they have made the change to a pre-payment system as part of that since it lets them charge more and makes it harder to switch.

As for the credit check, that too has nothing to do with smart meters, and certainly isn't new, energy companies have been insisting or deposits or pre-payment meters for years now if the person with their name on the bill didn't have a good enough credit rating...

There are exceptions though (..or at least their used to be..) so if she has problems then ask again here as it used to be the case that some only did a credit check if there were problems paying, others like British Gas for example seem to be very tough on the credit score when people are trying to move off of a pre-payment meter.

LeesArt

MWT said:

Was there a letting agent involved in this at any point?

If the HA did transfer the account to a different energy company it should still be there, but if they appointed an agent to handle the property for them then many of them will transfer the account to one of the providers that pay a 'commission' to them from the excessive costs that they charge, Spark Energy would be an example of that...

Personally I don't recall ever having 90 days before worrying about a bill, I've always taken care of that on the day I moved in and that had nothing to do with Smart meters.

It sounds like someone with the ability to make changes has messed this up for her by moving the account somewhere that rewards them for doing that and they have made the change to a pre-payment system as part of that since it lets them charge more and makes it harder to switch.

As for the credit check, that too has nothing to do with smart meters, and certainly isn't new, energy companies have been insisting or deposits or pre-payment meters for years now if the person with their name on the bill didn't have a good enough credit rating...

There are exceptions though (..or at least their used to be..) so if she has problems then ask again here as it used to be the case that some only did a credit check if there were problems paying, others like British Gas for example seem to be very tough on the credit score when people are trying to move off of a pre-payment meter.

No Letting agent
The HA put it into their Void company as usual.  Looking at their website it seems they also offer energy advice and I am wondering if the Neighbourhood Manager or some other person along the way did this.
Certainly nothing my niece would know about.
I am not saying that you did not need to change suppliers for 90 days, I meant that before smart meters you took reads and did not get a bill for 90 days.
You certainly never got cut off before you even moved in
The website of the company says No More Blackouts as a bonus of having pre-payment meters.
The energy company is OVO but we are forced to deal with a company called BOOST which is supposed to be a subsidiary, when you call OVO they said "no problem this is a 5 minute fix but I have to transfer you to Boost to make it happen" Boost made me wait for 20m at a time and then cut me off each time.  I kept ringing back OVO who had a 30m wait to speak to someone only for them to say the same thing, this time they said "Boost Support should be able to switch it back to pay monthly", they put me through to another script reader in South Africa.  After 20m of explaining again this one put me on hold for 35m and then hung up on me.
My niece does not have ability to use app, she will not be able to cope with this system
Can you please explain why it is harder to switch away?
A credit check may not be unusual but that does not make it right.
I have been speaking to energy companies and it seems that the big 6 and 2 cheap vendors who I have called, only do a credit check if you do not pay a quarterly bill.  It is never a barrier to becoming a client (one told me), Scottish Power and Southern Electric were quite happy to have a quarterly pay on receipt of bill.  The cheap vendors preferred to have direct debit if you wanted their best tariffs.
We are talking about what to me is a basic human right, Landlords would be strung up if they did not provide heat and hot water.
In trying to fix this we happened across the previous tenant who came by for some missing post from redirection.  She was with Bulb and not on a pre-payment account.
We have had to throw away all the food, the property is still without power.
Right now I am all over the HA, I want to find out which commission hungry person put her on OVO,  
I am asking them to put it back on their Voids supplier. 
Two things I have learnt from this terrible experience.
NEVER DEAL WITH OVO / BOOST
NEVER GET A SMART METER.

dogshome

Who were the 'Default' supplier the HA switched the flat to whilst it was between tenants?

I don't think Ovo are one of the back-hander suppliers who pay money to L/Agents to get the account switched to them whilst a flat is in limbo between tenants, which raises the possibility that the switch to Ovo was an "Erroneous Transfer" - These happen when someone Switches, but the data gets scrambled in the system and the wrong dwelling is switched.

The remedy is that the customer, (in this case the HA), must be switched back to their original supplier, and it takes a written Complaint to start the process

Gerry1

LeesArt said:

A credit check may not be unusual but that does not make it right.

I have been speaking to energy companies and it seems that the big 6 and 2 cheap vendors who I have called, only do a credit check if you do not pay a quarterly bill.  It is never a barrier to becoming a client (one told me), Scottish Power and Southern Electric were quite happy to have a quarterly pay on receipt of bill.

Apparently not.

thorganby

What a drama queen!

MWT

LeesArt said:

I am not saying that you did not need to change suppliers for 90 days, I meant that before smart meters you took reads and did not get a bill for 90 days.
You certainly never got cut off before you even moved in...

...Can you please explain why it is harder to switch away?

....A credit check may not be unusual but that does not make it right.

...I have been speaking to energy companies and it seems that the big 6 and 2 cheap vendors who I have called, only do a credit check if you do not pay a quarterly bill.  It is never a barrier to becoming a client (one told me), Scottish Power and Southern Electric were quite happy to have a quarterly pay on receipt of bill.  The cheap vendors preferred to have direct debit if you wanted their best tariffs.

Re the first point I guess we are going to have to agree to differ, switching and monthly billing have been around a lot longer than smart meters.

Getting 'cut-off' was certainly rare and frankly still is, but turning up and finding a pre-payment meter in place with no credit and no key has been going on as long as there has been pre-payment meters, so that side of this is not all that unusual, it is only the slowness in getting it sorted which is the problem and that is mostly down to a very poor supplier in form of Boost.

The difficulty in moving is that Boost only offer pre-payment so you can't get onto a credit account before you leave them so you are limited to those suppliers that will accept a pre-payment meter. Most do but not all.

Then once you've moved you have to get off of the pre-payment meter and onto a credit account through whatever process your new supplier has for that and this is where you are most likely to encounter the credit check.

So when picking a new supplier talk to them about the whole process and tell them exactly which type of meter she has because the new supplier is going to have to change it from pre-payment mode to credit mode and not all of them will find that easy...

If the HA can help in any way by arranging for her to switch to their usual supplier along with a change of meter mode then that might smooth the path..