Alternate Fuel Payment £200

Mstty

Surprised to see £200 arrive in my energy account this week marked Alternative Fuel Payment Grant.

We were not expecting it but on further inspection of the criteria used for the initial payments the village is not served by mains gas so every household will receive it no matter what their source of heating and hot water is.

I am guessing this broad stroke was the most efficient way with a seperate scheme for those that were genuinely missed.

dealyboy

Hi Mstty ...

Effectively yes ... unless you have a postcode where the majority use mains electricity for their heating.

BTW there are a number of very informative recent threads on the LPG forum 

Mstty

Thanks for the heads up @dealyboy

Flydrive

My £200 has just hit my British Gas Elec account which now leaves me with an est CREDIT of over £300. I need this money to buy OIL not prop up BG's ever increasing profits. The website says I am not entitled to a refund (!!!) and they will review in Sept.I can lower my SO by £25 per month but this is just 'drip feeding' my money back over a year! I want it NOW.

Archie_Duke

Flydrive said:

My £200 has just hit my British Gas Elec account which now leaves me with an est CREDIT of over £300. I need this money to buy OIL not prop up BG's ever increasing profits. The website says I am not entitled to a refund (!!!) and they will review in Sept.I can lower my SO by £25 per month but this is just 'drip feeding' my money back over a year! I want it NOW.

I’ve seen a few similar comments already this morning about the way BG have chosen to ‘pay’ their customers the grant by crediting their energy account.
Happily ShellEnergy paid “my” £200 straight into the bank account that the DD comes out of. I’ll actually miss Shell if they do pull out of the consumer energy market!

gessa12

According to Emily White's article on the main website, if you pay by DD then the energy company should refund the £200 into your bank account. For BG she is saying they have promised to complete all refunds by 28th February.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2022/12/northern-ireland-p600-energy-support-payment/ 

400ixl

Northern Ireland, where that article is for also have some different ways of working to the mainland UK.

mhcks

The Government document; Domestic Alternative Fuel Payment Scheme – Guidance for Electricity Suppliers provide the following:

 3.5 The following sets out the basic approach followed by BEIS in matching the various data sets and extracting the relevant list of MPANs for each supplier, identifying consumers to receive automatic payments for the AFP:

 a. Off gas grid postcodes. Xoserve have published a list of GB postcodes where there is no active gas meter point connection. Gas connection record as of 13 December 2022.

 b. Postcode look-up. ONS’s National Statistics Postcode Lookup is used to map active GB postcodes to Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOA). Data published on 24 November 2022.

 c. Census data on heating type. Provided by ONS and is used to identify the LSOAs that are eligible for automatic payments. BEIS will use this data to eliminate LSOAs that have been identified as predominantly having houses which heat their homes via electricity, as houses which are primarily electrically heated are not in scope of the Alternative Fuel Payment....

. d. MPAN report. Provided by the Retail Energy Code (REC), the data contains GB MPANs, the postcode in which the MPAN resides, with which electricity supplier each MPAN is associated and whether each MPAN is associated with a domestic or non-domestic supplier...


The problem is, with a.   the off grid gas postcodes are just rubbish:  the village where I live has no mains gas, yet the postcode is omitted from the list.  With b the spreadsheet is unusable:  I was unable to open it.

So we haven not received any payment, neither has anyone else in the village:  I guess we will have to claim independently come 8 March?

Spoonie_Turtle

mhcks said:

So we haven not received any payment, neither has anyone else in the village:  I guess we will have to claim independently come 8 March?

Yes.        

pcgtron

I'm on that list published by Xoserve, but I still didn't recieve the payment, so will have to apply. It's all a bit of a cluster f

Spoonie_Turtle

pcgtron said:

I'm on that list published by Xoserve, but I still didn't recieve the payment, so will have to apply. It's all a bit of a cluster f

That's only the first criterion for an automatic payment.  The second is being in an area where the main form of heating is not electric.  If you're not on the list of automatically eligible addresses then you have to apply - that's how it was designed.