Is there a duty of care or OFGEM rule on Energy companies to..

mmmmikey

DisabledDan said:

Thanks, I started off with a spreadsheet many years ago to compare suppliers, then it morphed into a bill checker, then I started using an app and the numbers did not match.  So I went back to the spreadsheet and broke down each section on the bill, cross checking the calculations which found the issues I mention above.  Like many people I have been SOLR'ed numerous times and when moving to a new supplier I find differences in those broken down areas.   

One supplier confirmed the 32 days and said "it will call come out as normal by the end of the year", so I stuck all their bills in a spreadsheet and there was no logic to the number of days charged.

I have had all sorts of issues over the years, sometimes a new charging period is created because they counted the read from the day before.  On others the computer went into some sort of loop and I had between 10 and 16 tariffs per month. quite how your average consumer is supposed to be able to work that out I don't know.

With one of those moves I found I was overcharged just under £2 per energy, no big deal and I was paid it back, but what about the millions who did not spot it and paid. This was based on the change of supply reading which I gather is an official line in the sand as far as OFGEM are concerned, but I had already paid for that and they did it on the wrong date because of this line in the sand.  

I can't say all customers were overcharged, but if they were and there are millions of customers then it is a tidy sum.

I have seen posts on another site where people have been overcharged because of a faulty meter or an economy 7 meter heating storage heaters during the day.  They have their way of calculating it, but there were 20 different opinions on how the energy company should correct it.  

I was just wondering if OFGEM has some rules about it or even guidance, it seems to me that the bill should match what a reasonable person might expect if they had the variables from my first post.

Hi again - there are quite a few different issues there which makes it hard to give a concise answer to your original question.

On a general point, suppliers are obviously required to bill you correctly and the bills should always show you meter readings, how many units you are being charged for and the rate, and how many days standing charge you are being charged for and the rate. The start meter reading for the latest bill should be the same as the end reading from the last bill. The start date for standing charges for the latest bill should always be the day after the last bill. Of course, there may be exceptions to correct any estimated readings or errors, but the principle holds true - you should always be able to tell from the bill what you are being charged for.

There's an important distinction to be made between "billing date" and "billing period". If your normal billing date is the 5th of the month it doesn't necessarily follow that the bill will cover the period from the 5th of the previous month to the 4th of this month. It could be the bill covers, for example, the last calendar month, so the bill from the 5th June could cover the period from 1st May to 31st May. This doesn't effect the accuracy of the bill. A more complex example might me that your bills cover the period of the 10th of last month to the 9th of this month, and are always sent out on the 12th of the month to allow for processing time. There might be rules to adjust the billing period and billing dates according to weekends and bank holidays which could lead to long or short months. Again, it doesn't effect the accuracy of your bill, you just have to check the period it covers and make sure it starts when the last one ends.

Also, there's no hard and fast reason why the billing period for standing charges needs to align with the billing period for unit costs and it doesn't effect the accuracy of the bills. You just need to check that one bill starts when the the last one ends and all will be OK.

As well as bank holidays and weekends, a number of other things could effect the billing period for a particular bill. It could be that you always get charged for the number of days standing charge according to a standard billing period (with any weekend/bank holiday adjustments) but your unit charges are billed accoring to your latest reading as long as it was from the last x days, or otherwise an estimate will be used.

These are just examples straight off the top of my head why you might get bills on different days for different periods. None of these affect the accuracy of the bills or your ability to check them and as such there is no obvious (to me) compelling reason for Ofgem or whoever to make suppliers work in a particular way.