GDPR rules for energy bills older than 7 years

Mira100

Hi, 

I'm in the middle of a case with the energy ombudsman and my old supplier, EON, where we have evidence of a broken meter. However, they only have bills dating back to 2017, but they were supplying me since 2000. Does anyone have any experience here on how I can get hold of archive bills from 2000-2017? 

Thanks,
M

QrizB

Welcome to the forum.

As far as I know, there's no obligation on businesses to keep records for more than six years. And there are good data protection reasons for them not to keep old records.

If you need records of old bills (or anything else) for your own purposes, you should keep them yourself.

MWT

Exactly right.

Side-effect of GDPR is that it greatly incentivised companies to make sure that records they are not obliged to keep are actively destroyed.

Scot_39

Yes we had to scrap a lot of old docs and plant data from customer sites gathered over the years to avoid possible legal complications.

And had to get customer explicit agreement for everything we were  taking from them to support ir support system upgrades going forward.

DullGreyGuy

GDPR requires a company not to hold data any longer than is necessary and as such companies have gotten better at deleting old data to stay compliant. The law doesn't define exactly how long they should hold things but the law of limitations on simple contract law is 6 years and so a general view is that 7 years is a good basis given its the 6 years plus 1 for prudency. 

Mira100 said:

I'm in the middle of a case with the energy ombudsman and my old supplier, EON, where we have evidence of a broken meter. However, they only have bills dating back to 2017, but they were supplying me since 2000. Does anyone have any experience here on how I can get hold of archive bills from 2000-2017? 

You find them in your own filing, if you didnt keep them then they simply dont exist any more. 

Hoenir

MWT said:

Exactly right.

Side-effect of GDPR is that it greatly incentivised companies to make sure that records they are not obliged to keep are actively destroyed.

If you've ever had to go through the process of retrieving a single box to extract a single document stored in an aircraft hanger you'll know why . 

DullGreyGuy

Hoenir said:

MWT said:

Exactly right.

Side-effect of GDPR is that it greatly incentivised companies to make sure that records they are not obliged to keep are actively destroyed.

If you've ever had to go through the process of retrieving a single box to extract a single document stored in an aircraft hanger you'll know why . 

Getting a single box back didnt tend to be too much of a problem as long as you remembered which box you put it in... it was doing it the other way round, an audit of everything you are paying to be stored -v- what you believe you are holding in storage. We'd been paying for 2 crates of teabags to be stored for over a decade with no one having any memory as to why they were sent into storage in the first instance.