My Letting Agents illegally switched my Gas Supplier, now I am dealing with Mafia SSE

km1500

What I don't understand is that if the gas bills were switched into and are in the letting agent's name, why is the OP even getting involved with SSE they are not even a SSE customer? SSE have to go after the LA for payment, not the OP.

The OP should go to Octopus as a new gas customer and switch the gas from SSE to Octopus. SSE should then send a final bill to the LA.

The LA may then come after the OP for payment but that is a different story.

Mstty

OP you have put a lot of time into your responses here to let's of replies.

I think your time would be best spent taking the emotion out of all your points and jotting them down with dates and key facts, no emotion.

I am in agreement with you as an Octopus customer over the past 2 years you could have saved more money with their (fringe tariffs such as tracker) but not overly on the SVT.

HLeung

km1500 said:

What I don't understand is that if the gas bills were switched into and are in the letting agent's name, why is the OP even getting involved with SSE they are not even a SSE customer? SSE have to go after the LA for payment, not the OP.

The OP should go to Octopus as a new gas customer and switch the gas from SSE to Octopus. SSE should then send a final bill to the LA.

The LA may then come after the OP for payment but that is a different story.

Hello km1500

Unfortunately when I first responded to SSE first bill in July 2022,( that covers July2020-July2022) I was not told that SSE sent the previous bills to the Letting Agents, as far as I was told by SSE at that point, they had been sending bills electronically, but I told them they were not sent to me because SSE didn't even have my details. At that point, SSE claimed that but the Gas meter number is correct and you have been living in the address and using the gas.... Soon after that I challenged the letting agent and told them I never received any bills and they admitted their mistakes. However even when SSE much later confirmed that they were sending the bills to the Letting agent, I am the account holder now and I am responsible, however how I would argue about it, they don't care. And whilst I was waiting the Letting Agent to clear and fix this issue which they confirmed they would, SSE continued holding me accountable for everything. So by Jan 2023 The Letting Agent said unfortunately they cannot help me to switch back to Octopus until I cleared the bill !!!! 

So now I am forced into settling a bill that was originally sent to the letting agents for 24 months ( based on incorrect estimated reading) and they are not taking responsibility, even they created the problem in the first place. 

pochase

I think they are taking responsibility, they are offering you a compensation of £200. If you can prove that your damages are more than the £200 you can ask for more, but with minimal differences between unit prices there will be no room for huge compensation.

The £200 will cover a 1p difference for 20000KWh. If you think your loss is bigger you will have to proof it, but you will need to use the real unit rates.

Add to that, that a big part of the fault lies with you. You did not react to the email that your gas account will be switched, and you did not check your bills for 2 years. They are add fault for the switch itself, and for ignoring the bills and not forwarding them.

They did not use the gas, you did, so why do you believe they are responsible to pay for your gas use. If you would have stayed with Octopus you also would have to pay for what you used, where is the difference apart from different unit rates if there are any?

EssexHebridean

The avoidance of two specific questions here make me feel that there is more going on than we are being told.

firstly - the “sorry you are leaving” contact which apparently provoked no reaction from the OP. Second, the fact that the lack of increase/eventual freeze of DD didn’t raise any red flags with them at a time when the entirety of the country was seeing bills increase, and this was being publicised in internally every single media outlet.  I would venture that the only people who have seen DD’s either fail to increase or to drop (effectively) in the past few years are those who have downsized dramatically, moved to ultra-energy efficient homes, or who have made a dramatic change to their use like for example completely stopping using heating/heating hot water.

 I’m also of the view that the “personal responsibility” aspect here means that taking the generous goodwill payment already offered and making an arrangement to pay the outstanding bill via a payment plan would be the best way forwards. Yes, the original transfer was wrong, but it could have easily been sorted out at the time - leaving it several years realistically has just made the situation worse. A simple check of the bills at any time would have made clear that something was wrong - so this is a salient lesson for others reading as to why we always remind folk on here that checking your energy (and other!) bills is a sensible thing to do. 

Mstty

Or the perfect storm of the customer not really paying attention to the news and energy price rises, the DD staying the same so they were thinking they were doing ok on energy use.

Easily done from the visitors here wince the price increases started not knowing how much energy was or their usage.

Going to cut the OP some slack here but agree they need to pay for the last two years gas and the £200 compensation from the lettingagents is not too bad. They could have saved a bit with tracker over two years so that could be the baseline for any savings they could have made.

tightauldgit

Dolor said:

Unless your name is on the energy account, then you owe SSE nothing. 

It would appear that his name IS on the energy account now after SSE have sorted out the error. I would imagine that his tenancy says that he is responsible for paying utilities so trying to push it onto the agent is a non-starter. 

[Deleted User]

tightauldgit said:

Dolor said:

Unless your name is on the energy account, then you owe SSE nothing. 

It would appear that his name IS on the energy account now after SSE have sorted out the error. I would imagine that his tenancy says that he is responsible for paying utilities so trying to push it onto the agent is a non-starter. 

That isn’t what the OP has implied in his original post:

Upon the first phone call with SSE, as I discovered that SSE did not even know who I was when I called, as they did not have my details on their system. They did not even have my full name, email address, nor phone numbers.

pochase

Mstty said:

Or the perfect storm of the customer not really paying attention to the news and energy price rises, the DD staying the same so they were thinking they were doing ok on energy use.

Easily done from the visitors here wince the price increases started not knowing how much energy was or their usage.

Going to cut the OP some slack here but agree they need to pay for the last two years gas and the £200 compensation from the lettingagents is not too bad. They could have saved a bit with tracker over two years so that could be the baseline for any savings they could have made.

Why should a cheaper possible tariff be the baseline?

OP clearly never had the thought to use tracker, otherwise he would have realised he is no longer with Octopus.

HLeung

pochase said:

I think they are taking responsibility, they are offering you a compensation of £200. If you can prove that your damages are more than the £200 you can ask for more, but with minimal differences between unit prices there will be no room for huge compensation.

The £200 will cover a 1p difference for 20000KWh. If you think your loss is bigger you will have to proof it, but you will need to use the real unit rates.

Add to that, that a big part of the fault lies with you. You did not react to the email that your gas account will be switched, and you did not check your bills for 2 years. They are add fault for the switch itself, and for ignoring the bills and not forwarding them.

They did not use the gas, you did, so why do you believe they are responsible to pay for your gas use. If you would have stayed with Octopus you also would have to pay for what you used, where is the difference apart from different unit rates if there are any?

the difference is eventually my account with Octopus will go into negative much sooner, because of the increase. But since it had moved to SSE, there's absolutely no visibility of my usage as I received nothing for 24 months from SSE. I do not deny paying for my usage but the fact that I was forced into switching and that the agent is at fault, and SSE sent the original bills for 24 months to the Lettings Agents, so someone must bear some responsibility. I have been responsible to setting up a direct debit with Octopus and at least I had never had any intention to avoid paying my own usage. There's no avoidance at play. But being forced to pay an incorrect bill is very hard to accept, especially I did not create the problem. When I spoke to Octopus, they believed and advise that SSE should honour the back-billing, and if in my case if that happened to Octopus, that's what they would do for their customers. Hence I pushed forward the back-billing enforcement but obviously SSE has different view, even they had been sending out based on estimated open that's a rejected figure at the start by Octopus. If the letting agent didn't provide the correct reading from the star and now I m forced to pay the bill based on false number, that in itself is unfair and unethical all round.