British Gas Billing Error

QrizB

tilyymolly said:

This has now been rectified and the person involved has moved to Octopus.

Thank you for coming back to let us know, surprisingly few people ever do!

RD_DS

@tilyymolly: Today, I checked my BG bills as they recently sent me a letter informing me of their intention to increase my monthly DD to £500+. When I logged-in, I found that our debt is £4,000+. Due to issues related to a family member with dementia, I'd not been checking the bills for some time. I started laboriously going through the bills, including my own conversions of the gas readings to kilowatt hours. We have a metric (m³) meter.

All the BG kwh figures were significantly different to my calcs. Eventually, I divided theirs by mine and got 2.8-ish. Needless to say, they seem to be basing my bill on it being a 100 ft³ meter. I'll be on the phone to them tomorrow and am anticipating a long, arduous struggle to get their outsourced "customer service" rep to understand. 

RD_DS

RD_DS said:

@tilyymolly: Today, I checked my BG bills as they recently sent me a letter ...

Quite disturbed that the resolution to your problem took about five months.If you have any tips on how to short-cut the process, I'd be obliged.

tilyymolly

RD_DS said:

@tilyymolly: Today, I checked my BG bills as they recently sent me a letter informing me of their intention to increase my monthly DD to £500+. When I logged-in, I found that our debt is £4,000+. Due to issues related to a family member with dementia, I'd not been checking the bills for some time. I started laboriously going through the bills, including my own conversions of the gas readings to kilowatt hours. We have a metric (m³) meter.

All the BG kwh figures were significantly different to my calcs. Eventually, I divided theirs by mine and got 2.8-ish. Needless to say, they seem to be basing my bill on it being a 100 ft³ meter. I'll be on the phone to them tomorrow and am anticipating a long, arduous struggle to get their outsourced "customer service" rep to understand. 

Unfortunately there was no fast way to resolve this. BG kept on assuring me they would rework the bill. Each time they did, they used the wrong conversion. 
Even after the ombudsman ruled in my favour they could not automatically rework the bill. 
The eventual fix was for the advanced complaints team to credit me and then debit the correct amount. I then closed the account after removing the remaining correct amount of credit.

RD_DS

tilyymolly said:

RD_DS said:

@tilyymolly: Today, I checked my BG bills as they recently sent me a letter informing me of their intention to increase my monthly DD to £500+. ...

Unfortunately there was no fast way to resolve this. BG kept on assuring me they would rework the bill. Each time they did, they used the wrong conversion. 
Even after the ombudsman ruled in my favour they could not automatically rework the bill. 
The eventual fix was for the advanced complaints team to credit me and then debit the correct amount. I then closed the account after removing the remaining correct amount of credit.

Thanks, @tilyymolly

I had almost a full working day dealing with this, yesterday. Part 1 was the initial customer services discussion. During the discussion, I got the feeling that they weren't understanding what I meant by "kilowatt hour", so I asked them directly if they did. I counted myself asking the question six times until I gave up. To be fair to her, I think it's more a matter of training. Eventually, she got the gist and said she'd have to escalate to the technical team. I offered to speak to them directly but that's not allowed. "That'll take 7-14 days".

Part 2: I decided to raise a complaint. Ended up in a text chat with somebody who understood the salient points. After a lengthy discussion, we were able to confirm that BG think my meter is imperial. It was changed as part of getting a smart meter by People's Energy in 2021. Shortly thereafter, BG took over their business, so I think our details weren't migrated accurately. The BG guy told me that they accept the error and will be re-calculating my bills within the next sven days. By my calcs, they've overcharged me by £8k since 2021.

Being a member of Which?, I've raised it with them as I suspect this could be the tip of the iceberg. I told the  BG complaint handler about this and also informed him that I will be making use of Which? Legal Services, if I don't think their recalcs are accurate. I'm hoping thhat this will focus their minds on doing things right. Judging by your comments above, I might be in for an interesting time.

Just remembered... at one point the complaints guy asked me to go through a process of turning all the gas appliances on to verify that the meter I was talking about was really the right one. Having just taken a few photos of the meter, I said "Can I suggest you just trust me, given that you've been mis-charging me for four years?". He gave in on that point.

RD_DS

The thing that really bemused me was the question "is it a four-digit or five-digit" meter. So, their primary way of distinguishing between an imperial or metric meter is the number of digits on the units display on the meter. Not the fact that it clearly reads "m³", rather than "ft³". I'm also surprised that the "smart" meter doesn't transmit data about the meter - at the very least, its serial number. If it did, this should have alerted BG to the fact that the meter they had on their billing records was different to the one in our house.

QrizB

RD_DS said:

I'm also surprised that the "smart" meter doesn't transmit data about the meter - at the very least, its serial number.

All UK domestic smart meters are metric. This should have been a clue to BG, too ...

RD_DS

QrizB said:

RD_DS said:

I'm also surprised that the "smart" meter doesn't transmit data about the meter - at the very least, its serial number.

All UK domestic smart meters are metric. This should have been a clue to BG, too ...

Quite. I've since found out that smart meters' data do include meter identification info and that can be cross-referenced against meter attribute data. So, it should be a trivial task to find customers who are being incorrectly billed. So, either incompetence or negligence.