Energy companies - not afraid of the Energy Ombudsman?

Vizard

ArbitraryRandom said:

Vizard said:

Are you willing to be pestered for some indeterminate amount of time while EDF works through the dispute (or doesn't)? I imagine it is having an impact on your business and your life outside work. How will this look if you eventually decide to take EDF to court? A history of failure to take simple mitigating actions to limit the impact of the issues might be detrimental to your case, and you may not be able to claim for costs you let get out of hand through your own inaction.

As I have explained, I would have to make 182 phone calls or send 182 letters, assuming that each of the debt collectors acted upon my correspondence in every case. Given the calibre of the people I'd be dealing with, it is not an unrealistic estimate that it could be three times that number.

I very much doubt that a judge would penalise me for not responding to every contact, when the full situation is made clear.

If you are trying to claim costs for dealing with each contact (as you seem to have attempted with your previous case) then they will... 

But to restate in case you misunderstood, you would only need to send seven letters (one per collection agency) each listing the account numbers of all relevant accounts. 

I mentioned that I took one agency to task and they backed off. They were given the details of all sites, they did not back off on all accounts.

These agencies ply their trade by trying to continually bludgeon the customer into submission. Which is why we are taking the course of action I described.

masonic

If 7 letters written in the manner ArbitraryRandom set out doesn't do the trick, then you can always raise a formal complaint against any errant debt collection agencies and take each to the Financial Ombudsman if not appropriately resolved. On top of any compensation that might be awarded for the distress and inconvenience, they'd have to pay a £750 case fee assuming they'd used up their 3 free cases. Though I doubt any of the 7 would continue trying to contact you following receipt of the letter.

My guess is that it will be a long time before any proceedings are brought against you, if they are at all, and it could be a long time before you cease to be contacted by these agencies. Isn't the cost of a few first class stamps worth it for a bit of peace and quiet? You can even ask for the cost to be refunded as part of your redress due to not being able to get the point across when answering the calls.

Vizard

masonic said:

If 7 letters written in the manner Arbitrary Random set out doesn't do the trick, then you can always raise a formal complaint against any errant debt collection agencies and take each to the Financial Ombudsman if not appropriately resolved. On top of any compensation that might be awarded for the distress and inconvenience, they'd potentially have to pay an £800 case fee. Though I doubt any of the 7 would continue trying to contact you following receipt of the letter.

Good info thanks.

Moving this on a bit, I mentioned in my OP that we are now having issues with Eon Next (EN) and they are similar to those we had with EDF and I'd prefer to nip it in the bud.

Basically: All of our accounts are hugely in credit, so we asked for refunds. We sent in meter reads, but EN didn't apply them. 

Then they said the readings we had sent were now out of date (over 14 days). It is not easy for us to obtain ad hoc readings, but we did re-read for one account and submitted the readings. EN didn't apply them again and they have not re-billed or refunded.

We had this problem with them pre-EDF, which was one of the reasons we moved. We almost never got refunds and they would always say that credit control were blocking it due to the readings being too old, even though we had provided them recently. We thought it might be deliberate for cashflow purposes.

On the basis that our DDs were clearly too high I asked for them to be reduced. All of this is via the CEO's office by now. I checked with them pre-Christmas and none of the DDs had been reduced.

I called and spoke to an agent at EN and explained that we may have no option but to cancel our DDs. "That's what I would do" came the reply.

The DDs were due for payment yesterday, but we had cancelled them. TODAY I have received two calls asking why we've cancelled our DD and that there is "outstanding debt". These calls were from local numbers, but I suspect in reality from abroad.

This is where smart meters would be useful. They could not claim that readings were out of date. But we simply don't trust the energy companies, at least two of which we know to be out of control. 

Chrysalis

Vizard said:

Hi All

We have a small business with multiple sites.

Last year, a broker called Bionic switched our services to EDF, who were awful. They ignored readings and sent us bonkers bills - tens of thousands of pounds, when they should have been a few thousand. They were impossible to contact.

We spent a lot of time putting together an Ombudsman complaint. Days in fact. The Ombudsman found in our favour and ordered that EDF must pay us £100. It cost us many, many times that to complain.

We are now with Eon Next. We send them readings, they don't apply them, and when we ask for a refund of our credit balances they say the readings are out of date. We provide more, they don't apply them, we ask for our credit balances back...they say the readings are out of date.

We raised a CEO office complaint with EON Next. Eventually someone contacted us, didn't resolve the issue and said "do you want a deadlock letter?"

So, it seems to me that Energy companies will offer a deadlock letter very swiftly, so that they don't need to deal with complaints, in the knowledge that sanctions from the Ombudsman are trivial.

Is the Energy Ombudsman just a patsy for the energy companies, or are we doing it wrong?

The official compensation amounts are low.

But in my case the official declared compensation to the Ombudsman was only £150 (which for the dispute was really low), however "off the book" Octopus gave me a little under £1600 credit if I remember right.  So at least in Octopus case once it got escalated they finally started taking me seriously.  In addition the £1600 wasnt conditional, they rang me on a Sunday and told me I was already credited, but to get the £150 I had to close the case and pretend £150 settled it.

Prior to the Ombudsman escalation, Octopus however were very obstructive, I didnt even get a deadlock as an example and had to wait for the two months to expire.