Lawyer suggestions or advice on compensation from British Gas after massive overpayment

MWT

As a business owner I have never yet paid a bill that I didn't verify as accurate, it is a reasonable behaviour to expect of a business and to the extent that you did not even try to verify the amounts being billed were accurate you damage any claim to 'compensation' that you may have.

You should have known as a business roughly what amount of power you expected to consume and when the first huge bill arrived you should have challenged it immediately.

You are of course entitled to receive a prompt refund of the overcharges, but that's really all you can expect with any certainty.

You can make a case for interest, but the rate will be pitifully low, compensation for anything else is going to be a stretch as you have not behaved in a reasonable manner as a business and should have acted to challenge these bills much earlier than you did...

Mobtr

When your meter was exchanged you should have had a revised bill using the correct final reading. Did you get this? This should say how much you are in credit. Did the engineer who changed the meter give you the final reads or is there any stickers on the new meter with the info? 

Dazed_and_C0nfused

i asked them for compensation and they refused, so now i want to take it to the next stage 

I haven't read through every single post so it may already have been covered but why bother with "compensation".

Wouldn't your bills being recalculated be a satisfactory outcome?  Or do you want a cherry on top?

daveyjp

Too many seem to think this is the same as a domestic situation, it isn't.

It's a half hourly meter with a capacity charge, a domestic supply doesn't have this billing element (its a charge to the DNO for them reserving the capacity for your use, whether you use it or not) and half hourly metering is required to produce an accurate capacity charge based bill.

If OP has been paying for a capacity of say 250 kVa, but only uses 50 kVa an adjustment needs to be made, but with no half hourly records this figure is lost in history.  It needs a negotiation and for this an expert may be required.

MWT

daveyjp said:

If OP has been paying for a capacity of say 250 kVa, but only uses 50 kVa an adjustment needs to be made, but with no half hourly records this figure is lost in history.  It needs a negotiation and for this an expert may be required.

This shouldn't be that difficult, the capacity charge is only a small proportion of the monthly bill (see the bill segment posted earlier) and the vast majority is just the over-estimated units consumed, not worth the cost to get an expert involved in that.

The meter was working correctly so there should be no argument about the total units consumed...

Robin9

Going forward -  how is the meter going to be read ?  These meters for industrial supplies  are not DIY.

Is BG going to send the meter meter reader every month ?