Over a year to sort British Gas account change after energy company folded. Locked into tariff

NLe10E

I was with People's Energy when it folded and was reverted to British Gas as supplier of last resort in Nov '21. It has taken over a year for British Gas to sort out the transfer of my account. For many months it was simply a case of having to wait as it was in progress. Then an extended period as I was not able to access my online account to manage it due to the fact that their systems were unable to cope with the fact that I had been a customer before People's Energy and when I tried logging in kept taking me to the dormant account. It has taken their support staff over 4 months to finally resolve the issue.  In the meantime, because their call handling system requires an account number, which I did not have, I could not interact meaningfully with their staff on the phone. Eventually they finally presented a £6K bill for the 12 months since transferring and a week later threatened to involve a debt collection agency.  So far we have been offered £75 compensation for the issues.
My belief is that by mismanaging my account for this period, has prevented me from getting access to the account and locked me into their standard tariff without any option to find out what tariff I was on or exercise my right to switch to a cheaper alternative in the period before this energy price crises.
Thoughts regarding any basis for wanting more significant compensation such as a reimbursement of the difference between best available tariff and what I was locked into?

[Deleted User]

A brilliant exposition of the difficulties that some SoLRs have had dealing with the administrators of failed suppliers who are no longer subject to energy industry regulations. If the time taken to set up your account has taken so long, I assume that this is the subject of an ongoing complaint against BG?

How about an example of a tariff that you could have switched to and when? When did you receive your Final Bill from People’s Energy?

MWT

The tariff you were on was not a mystery as it was clearly published by BG at the time of the SoLR announcement.

Did you actually attempt to switch to a different supplier?

EssexHebridean

I was transferred to BG after Utility Point went under - got correspondence pretty much immediately confirming the name of the new tariff and the details about it? The rest of the process - and especially the transfer of credit - took some time, but finding out about the tariff was remarkably easy.

NLe10E

MWT said:

The tariff you were on was not a mystery as it was clearly published by BG at the time of the SoLR announcement.

Did you actually attempt to switch to a different supplier?

The trouble is that we could not discuss our account with British Gas for almost a year as they said that the account was still in transition. Therefore, although they could confirm that we were a customer, they could not provide us with a customer account number. We were caught in the vicious cycle of them being unable to tell us a customer number, but being unwilling to talk to us without one.  Trying to login to the online portal to manage the account online or find the account number took us to our OLD account that we had with them years before.  Therefore we could not switch as we had no way of telling a new supplier what our BG account was 

NLe10E

[Deleted User] said:

 If the time taken to set up your account has taken so long, I assume that this is the subject of an ongoing complaint against BG?

Yes, and so far they have offered £75 compensation

[Deleted User]

NLe10E said:

[Deleted User] said:

 If the time taken to set up your account has taken so long, I assume that this is the subject of an ongoing complaint against BG?

Yes, and so far they have offered £75 compensation

In that case, you have the option of referring your complaint to The Energy Ombudsman.

MWT

NLe10E said:

Trying to login to the online portal to manage the account online or find the account number took us to our OLD account that we had with them years before.  Therefore we could not switch as we had no way of telling a new supplier what our BG account was 

You are not required to give your new supplier any details about your account with your current supplier, so there was no reason not to switch if you were unhappy with BG...

The only impact it might have had was to slow down any refund you may have been due from PE...

EssexHebridean

NLe10E said:

[Deleted User] said:

 If the time taken to set up your account has taken so long, I assume that this is the subject of an ongoing complaint against BG?

Yes, and so far they have offered £75 compensation

How does this compare with the amount you could have saved had you moved to the fix you had your eye on? 

pochase

The main issues I am seeing here

- did you raise a complaint and did you take it to the Ombudsman?
- did you not get any invoices that showed you your rates? 
- as mentioned earlier switching was possible for you, even so it was mainly EDF and Octopus during this time, but that also limits any better tariffs that might have been available to you
- can you show what "better" deals you have been looking at, and were they even open for switching? You probably can mainly claim fixed tariffs at BG here and to my knowledge there was nothing really great in the beginning of 2022 left. When did you start into looking for a deal?