Scottish Power not processing £66 refund

pocketslint

We are now into November and SP have yet to credit me with anythying from the Govt's £400 under the EBSS. They have yet again added my DD payment onto the credit already in my account, but no 'surplus' has been paid into my bank account. I surely cannot be the only one?

MattMattMattUK

pocketslint said:

We are now into November and SP have yet to credit me with anythying from the Govt's £400 under the EBSS. They have yet again added my DD payment onto the credit already in my account, but no 'surplus' has been paid into my bank account. I surely cannot be the only one?

You almost certainly are not the only one, that is irrelevant. 

The energy suppliers were asked, at short notice, to implement a process into a system that was not designed to handle it and to roll that out to multiple billing methods across the system. There are teething problems, they are working through them but that will take time. They will get there in the end and for the vast majority the system has worked as intended, some have not and first they need to figure out why, then then need to fix the implementation and then deploy the solution (likely multiple solutions). The staff in the call centre will be reading from a script and there is likely little if anything they can do at this stage because they are not accountants or software engineers. You have one choice which is to wait, you can choose to make multiple phone calls, send multiple emails, or become stressed during that waiting period, but none of those actions will accelerate the process. 

pocketslint

Thanks for that Matt. As I alluded to in my initial post I have already been waiting for whomever/whatever to sort itself out. So long as it is a recognosed problem then I am willing to wait  a little longer still. Fortunately my account is in credit, therefore any delay is not immediately pressing for me personally right now. Thanks again, Pockets.

MattMattMattUK

All the providers recognise that there are issues with the system and are working on resolving them, unfortunately that is taking time and the time that it takes to make changes to large accounting and software systems is longer than people seem to be willing to wait before calling again. I heard one senior person from an energy provider saying on the radio that there were dozens of potential problems with the system and that in terms of testing due to the short notice given by the government they had far less time to test before deploying. Some issues are account specific, some relate to groups, others are random, in some cases the accounts system has the correct amount but that is refusing to feed through to the system the customer sees etc. 

Having been involved in deployments when changes are made at last minute to systems never designed to handle them I have sympathy with those trying to make this work. I understand that is not ideal from the customers perspective, but I can also see why it has happened and why it is taking time to resolve. 

Intoodeep

Scottish Power paid £66 straight into my account on October 20th 2022, this was the first I received.

pocketslint

Okay, so SP have paid £66 into my SP account overnight. I was expecting it to be paid into my bank account as I am in credit and they did take my monthly DD in any case, but so long as I get it I am not overly concerned. It just means that I will have to now ask them for a refund.

So I take it they are paying out at the end of the month, and that this is the payment from October?