Shell energy - first bill and debt collector letter in the same week

thebottomline

Good evening all,

I’m hoping for a bit of advice on what to do here in what I think is an unusual situation, but could be indicative of an issue that will effect multiple other customers. 

My wife and I moved house at the very end of September, moving quite far away from where we previously lived. Upon moving in I used the MSE tool to find the best energy provider and opened an account with them. I subsequently received a letter a few days later saying they were unable to process the new account opening.

Upon giving them a call it turns out the reason was because the previous homeowners were with PurePlanet, who went bust shortly after we moved in. Whilst the previous owners had closed their account in full, the address was registered with PurePlanet and so we had to initially wait until Ofgem made the necessary move to their chosen new firm and we could then process a move. 

Several weeks pass and then we are contacted by both Shell Energy as our new provider saying they’re in the process of getting everything set up and then PurePlanet to pay the balance for our usage up to the date Shell took over (19th October). 

Several more weeks pass with almost nothing. I regularly check the Shell Energy website and there are no updates. I email the Shell customer services and get no response. So we don’t have an account fully set up and any contact we can make we just get told to wait until we hear from them. 

Finally a couple of weeks ago we get a letter saying we’re about to receive our first bill. 

That first bill arrived this week, as did a letter from a debt collecting firm saying we’ve a debt to Shell Energy that has been from 17th October onwards, the values on both letters are the same. The letter from Shell is dated 7th February but was received this week (all Shell letters have been dated about two weeks earlier than the date we received them). The letter of 7th Feb clearly states “here is your first bill”. The letter from the debt collector is dated 24th February. 

Because we’ve been unable to speak to anyone at Shell and get told we have to wait until we heard from them, we have no ability to log into an online account as we do not have a full account with them. Because we moved in after the old people had closed their account and thus weren’t registered with PurePlanet, we had no direct debit leaving or account.  This week was the first letter that had an account number, but all letters including from the debt collector firm are addressed to “Owner Occupier”. 

How should I best proceed? I’ve tried calling Shell today as we’ve just got home from a few days away, but they’re closed and don’t open until 8am Monday morning. My thoughts are to call tomorrow, try to set up an actual account and pay the bill, and demand the debt collector be called off. 

I have two concerns given that it’s been passed to a debt collector though; the first is whether or not I’ll still be able to pay it off directly with Shell or will they see it as “passed to debt collector” and not be able to accept the money?

The second concern is whether it’ll impact my credit rating? I know they don’t have my name or details yet, but they do have my address and will have my name tomorrow when I finally set the account up. When we moved house we ported our old fixed rate mortgage which is able to be renewed around April time, so I wouldn’t want this absolute mess to impact that. 

We’ve been putting money aside knowing a big bill was coming, but this debt collector letter has been quite a shock and the language is quite threatening - talking of ”establishing residency” if we don’t pay within three days, which is today’s date. I can’t even pay if I wanted to today!!

I explained the complex situation in one of my emails to Shell late last year, to try and get some progress and an account set up, but got absolutely no response. 

Any help is much appreciated. I know the house move and therefore void in accounts on this property adds complexity, but I think there’s a chance other people may be impacted by this mess. Shell energy’s own website was only updated this Monday (21st Feb) and says customers coming over from Pure Planet may not get their first bill until early March:
https://www.shellenergy.co.uk/blog/post/welcome-new-customers

Thanks for any help. 

Ultrasonic

thebottomline said:

So we don’t have an account fully set up and any contact we can make we just get told to wait until we hear from them. 

I can't help with many of your questions but I'll reply to just this bit. On your bill there will be an account number, which if you use it to try to log in on the Shell Energy website you'll likely end up being asked to set a password and then have access to your online account. This is how it worked for me (as a former Pure Planet customer).

Ultrasonic

Verdigris said:

TL:DR but you automatically go on the deemed tariff of the incumbent supplier. You are free to change to a different once you have registered your opening meter reading with that supplier.

If you actually do read the post you'll see you're missing the principle concern here.

thebottomline

Ultrasonic said:

thebottomline said:

So we don’t have an account fully set up and any contact we can make we just get told to wait until we hear from them. 

I can't help with many of your questions but I'll reply to just this bit. On your bill there will be an account number, which if you use it to try to log in on the Shell Energy website you'll likely end up being asked to set a password and then have access to your online account. This is how it worked for me (as a former Pure Planet customer).

Thanks, I only received an account number in the very recent correspondence. The first thing I’d tried was to do exactly that but the login page requires an email address, which they don’t have registered for my account because I never had a PurePlanet account.

I have been unable to find any option from the website where I can create / login to an account from the account number alone and every option requires an email address (screenshot attached). 

Only alternative could be to try it on a laptop rather than a mobile device, but mobile device has no options. I’ll try a Laptop this evening.  

 

Ultrasonic

Ah yes, Shell had my e-mail address from Pure Planet, and I actually received my bill via e-mail rather than by post.

Phoning up again sounds like it probably is the best option, with the fact you now have a bill and an account number hopefully meaning you can get rather further than before.

thebottomline

Update: I called them, they set me up a new, fresh account and called off the bailiffs. Was on hold for a veeeery long time and their website appeared to have crashed and was showing a Covid update from September, so I’m assuming several other people heard from them this last week and had issues. 

So if anyone gets a similar issue, just be patient on hold and after that the team were pretty helpful. 

Mods / similar - feel free to close thread thanks.