British Gas electricity customers beware !

nobby1963

Sorry for the long post …
I would like to highlight to fellow forum users a situation that I have experienced.

Back at the end of September last year, my electricity supplier British Gas, emailed me saying that, as I had a Smart Meter, there was no need for me to contact them directly with an electricity meter reading when the well publicised new prices come into effect on October 1st.

I’m guessing that after the previous price increases and the issues that they and other electricity suppliers had with huge numbers of customers trying to submit their readings online and over the phone, this was their way of trying to prevent so many customers from clogging up their systems.

I was transferred to BG as a seller of last resort when Neon Reef collapsed, because of this I must confess to being less than happy with the customer service that BG provides, just contacting them has always been a problem, with long delays on their phone lines.

I had already been dealing with the BG executive office over the lack of accurate bills I was receiving.

I have always paid our bills by a fixed monthly direct debit.

I was unaware, but paying this way with BG meant that I would only receive an accurate bill every 6 months.

If I wanted a monthly bill from them, I was told that the only way was to pay my actual bill amount each month.

This wasn’t what I wanted and couldn’t really understand but it was the way their system worked.

The lady who was helping me in the executive office was able to generate a bill for me and said that there was a way that she could get me a bill every 3 months but that wasn’t a usual option. 

I accepted that.

When I received my bill I was able to see that as the October 1st price change was covered by the bill, BG had used an estimated reading for the cut off between old and new prices.

As I said, we have a smart meter set to provide BG with a reading every 30 minutes.

Why then had BG used an estimated reading ?

Because I have very little confidence in the BG customer service I had taken a photo of my meter reading on September 30th at around 11pm.

In my case the reading that BG had used was not accurate, and was 5kwh out in their favour ( they were charging me the new higher rate for 5kwh more than they should ).

I brought this up with the BG executive office lady with whom I had been dealing and she said that as far as she was concerned BG used a reading taken as close to midnight as possible on occasions when price changes were happening. She could not explain why this hadn’t happened but arranged a £1 credit for the difference.

After thinking about this situation for a while, it got me wondering how many BG customers ( and perhaps customers of other electricity companies ) that might have been affected by BG using an estimated reading for the price change point.

I’m sure many many thousands of customers would have received the exact same email as me in September and decided not to submit their own accurate readings, thinking BG would get it from their smart meters ?

Baring in mind that I can’t be the only one who wouldn’t get an accurate bill from them until every 6 months, how many others might have been affected and potentially over charged. How many would check when they eventually did receive a bill if the reading used at price change point was accurate ?

I decided to raise a complaint with the Ombudsman.

What I have found out and their ultimate response has surprised me.

BG don’t get the meter readings from our Smart Meters directly, they use a third party company. They are therefore not able to confidently say what time the readings they use are taken.

Some BG customers, perhaps other suppliers too ( probably ) have their meters set to provide readings much much less often, daily / weekly / monthly. This being the case the likelihood of more inaccurate readings being used is greater.

The Ombudsman has stated that there will be ‘winners’ in this situation as well as losers. 

They have received relatively few complaints about this.

They do not seem to have any problem with what has happened.

So, next time there’s a price change, and let’s face it they are more likely to be increases in price, ignore BG saying that they have all the information they need to get an accurate reading from you.

Take your own reading and check it if you can.

I don’t know how many BG electricity customers there are but if there’s a few thousand or hundreds of thousands like me then BG did well out of the last price increase based on inaccurate readings being used !

Gerry1

You can have monthly bills, at least on BG's existing system.  Not sure whether FDDs are included.

BooJewels

I don't have a smart meter, so manually submit my (gas only) readings to BG at the end of every month.  To beat the rush, I did so on 29th September, thinking that they'd either use that directly as close enough, or estimate a slight increase on it for the extra day.

What they actually did was use an estimate of 7m³ LESS than the reading I gave them (I gave 27247, they used 27240), for the reading on 30th September.  This means that those 7m³ difference were billed at the higher price from 1st October, as they were tagged into my next bill.    I reckon that's a couple of quid in their coffers that they weren't actually entitled to.  They didn't even tag it as an estimated reading, they had it down as 'meter reading you gave us'.  Which it wasn't.

It's just another, in a long line of issues, that I am accumulating into what will be a formal complaint at some time in the near future.

nobby1963

Gerry1 said:

You can have monthly bills, at least on BG's existing system.  Not sure whether FDDs are included.

Hi Gerry,
I am as confident as I can be that although it may show up on the BG website as an option it isn’t currently available.
As I said in my post I was being dealt with by the executive office and I think if it was as simple as that I would have just been transferred over to it.
Cheers
Nobby.

maisie_cat

We transferred from NR to BG and have had no problems, the difference being that we don't have a smart meter and I give them meter readings monthly as a minimum.
My end of October meter readings were estimated out by a few kWh as well, I suspect that most people are caught in a tiny monetary amount of swings and roundabouts at tariff change. 

pochase

nobby1963 said:

Gerry1 said:

You can have monthly bills, at least on BG's existing system.  Not sure whether FDDs are included.

Hi Gerry,
I am as confident as I can be that although it may show up on the BG website as an option it isn’t currently available.
As I said in my post I was being dealt with by the executive office and I think if it was as simple as that I would have just been transferred over to it.
Cheers
Nobby.

If you are on the old billing system it is available, if you are on the new system it is not.

I have not seen any reports what will happen when somebody who is on variable direct debit is switched to the new system. Will they lose variable direct debit or not?

@Gerry1 are you already on the new system?

Problem is that variable direct debit is not a payment system that Ofgem requires the suppliers to provide.

Gerry1

@pochase Still on the old system AFAIK.

MWT

nobby1963 said:

I don’t know how many BG electricity customers there are but if there’s a few thousand or hundreds of thousands like me then BG did well out of the last price increase based on inaccurate readings being used !

As the Ombudsman said, they will have lost as much as they gained in all probability so doubt they are significantly profiting from this sort of thing...

nobby1963

MWT said:

nobby1963 said:

I don’t know how many BG electricity customers there are but if there’s a few thousand or hundreds of thousands like me then BG did well out of the last price increase based on inaccurate readings being used !

As the Ombudsman said, they will have lost as much as they gained in all probability so doubt they are significantly profiting from this sort of thing...

Hi,
I wish I could agree with you but I’m afraid I don’t, my real point is that BG have consciously misled me and others into believing that they would use an accurate reading from my smart meter, in reality they took a meter reading from a third party company, taken at some random point in time.
The reality is that probably they wanted to stop their servers and phone lines from getting clogged up.
I just can’t believe that such a deception on this scale has been allowed to go unchallenged.
Cheers
Nobby.

pochase

There will winners and losers, and it does not matter if the price increases or decreases, those who win at a price increase would lose at the decrease and the other way around.

The way you describe it you got the credit to make up more than your loss for the higher cost of 5KWh, about 35p.

So what did you complaint to the Ombudsman for? What was your expectation they should/could do. You can only contact them for your own case, not for other people.

[Deleted User]

nobby1963 said:

MWT said:

nobby1963 said:

I don’t know how many BG electricity customers there are but if there’s a few thousand or hundreds of thousands like me then BG did well out of the last price increase based on inaccurate readings being used !

As the Ombudsman said, they will have lost as much as they gained in all probability so doubt they are significantly profiting from this sort of thing...

Hi,
I wish I could agree with you but I’m afraid I don’t, my real point is that BG have consciously misled me and others into believing that they would use an accurate reading from my smart meter, in reality they took a meter reading from a third party company, taken at some random point in time.
The reality is that probably they wanted to stop their servers and phone lines from getting clogged up.
I just can’t believe that such a deception on this scale has been allowed to go unchallenged.
Cheers
Nobby.

FWiW, Octopus uses a third-party to access the DCC Network. TMA/CGI provides the network access using its approved secure Adapter software. All suppliers use data collectors such as TMA; Morrisons; Lowri Beck ….