British Gas moved me to paperless bills without my consent
I want to help improve our environment, I want to make that clear upfront.
My energy bills are the only paper bills I get though and the reason is, so I can prove my address.
Every so often we need to apply for something where we need to prove our address, so a recent bill is generally requested.
I have chosen to keep getting my periodical statements through the post and I had not planned to change that.
I got an email from them today telling me I'd been switched to paperless. They didn't ask me first, they just switched it.
I take affront to that so I contacted them and instructed them to change it back.
They told me it had been switched back and I have to take their word for it.
I don't like how they did this so I want to talk about it.
btw. I know that some might say I should print out the statement if I ever need to prove my address, but I believe me buying a printer and ensuring there is working ink cartridges in it just for this rare circumstance is a false economy and too much hassle. It doesn't make sense to me to try and find a place that does printing either and my friends don't have printers.
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I am more surprised that you still need a bill to prove your address, I thought with the fact that people could knock one up these days in minutes that would have long died. When I recently had to do KYC for a business bank account as a company director the only documents they would accept were passport, driving license and Council Tax bill, utility bills were not on the list. Is a utility bill still valid in any context as a proof of address?
They all seem to do it at times
re BG
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/help-and-support/bills-and-payments/getting-a-paper-copy-of-your-bill
I'm a fan of aper billing but some only do that once 6 months i think, may be wrong
ours is edf and i'm pretty sure its every 6 months and i had to call tThanks
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Council tax bill however can be used all year OP - so this would probably be suitable for most purposes anyway?
Usually a supplier wishing to change someone to paperless confirms that they will do so unless an objection is received, in my experience.
Thank you, if council tax statement will do then I won't worry about whether BG actually do switch it back to paper statements.
You don't mention your region, but TW, for example, has about 6.5m customers. if they bill each customer twice a year, that's 13m bills. An awful lot of paper, envelopes and stamps. By contrast, online billing is nearly without cost.
The assumption that paperless billing is better for the environment is debatable if the servers are overseas and powered by electricity made with fossil fuels and the thousands of kilometers of cables used require a lot of oil to make the materials used in their manufacture.
The servers are going to be running to generate the billing anyway before it goes to paper: sticking with paper billing doesn't change that impact at all.