Third Party which can intervene and sort out Energy Bills

Fozzie_Bear

We are a community village hall and classed as a business customer. We have different suppliers for Gas and Electricity as this worked out cheaper(and safer as can be seen below) than dual fuel.
We are currently with SSE whose customer service is horrendous and have unresolved billing issues going back nearly three years. At one point they threatened to cut off our electricity until we told them they hadn't sent us a bill in over a year despite us regularly contacting them and asking for one. The only way to prevent them cutting us off was to pay "something on account" which our treasurer did to avoid the hall closing.
We have had three different smart meters fitted as they do not report our usage due to poor mobile phone signal in the village so have had to resort to manual reading of the smart meters.

Our main argument with them is that they have never formally supplied us with an opening balance and the figure they appear to be working on is different to the end figure of the previous supplier.
We have written several complaint letters and also raised with Ofgem but its still not sorted.

They have now issued £1000's in refund credits but we still have no bill and cannot set up a direct debit going forward.

Are there any companies like "No win-No Fee solicitors" who can help untangle this mess for a fee. It needs someone who has reconciliation skills and can tie up meter readings with bills and payments. Our treasure has tried numerous times to sort it out and spent hours and hours on the phone but frankly as an unpaid volunteer does not have the time or expertise.

Neil_Jones

Business energy is pretty much unregulated and you don't get most if any of the protections of the domestic market.  This may include back billing as well.

The cleanest solution may be to simply pick somebody else but usually you're in a fixed contract deal for x years which can't end before the exit date. Once that date passes you usually pay some ridiculous eye watering rate until you move or pick another tariff.

If you cannot set up direct debits how are you paying the suppliers now?

MWT

Neil_Jones said:

Business energy is pretty much unregulated and you don't get most if any of the protections of the domestic market.  This may include back billing as well.

That isn't as true now as it was a few years ago.

The Energy Ombudsman will be able to help with this as long as there has been a formal complaint at some point over the last 3 years...

Scot_39

Its more likely they might well fall under one of the two Ofgem protection levels many small businesses with limited turnover and staff do - so called Micro (to which at least some of the domestic protectins do apply) and Small businesses (I havent looked at the detail as to the extent).  

But the OP could initially check if the Energy Ombudsman would take their complaint (not Ofgem itself)

https://www.energyombudsman.org/how-we-can-help

And they as of last year (end of 2024) do also appear to now help the larger of those two designations.

https://www.energyombudsman.org/news/energy-ombudsman-extends-access-to-small-businesses

Fozzie_Bear

Neil_Jones said:

Business energy is pretty much unregulated and you don't get most if any of the protections of the domestic market.  This may include back billing as well.

The cleanest solution may be to simply pick somebody else but usually you're in a fixed contract deal for x years which can't end before the exit date. Once that date passes you usually pay some ridiculous eye watering rate until you move or pick another tariff.

If you cannot set up direct debits how are you paying the suppliers now?

That is the situation. We were with a Broker who negotiated our contracts but when we had problems with billing we dropped them as they did not negotiate with the energy company to resolve them. The energy company insisted on dealing with us rather than the broker. We tried to transfer to another company but were blocked by them due to the billing issues. At the moment we have only paid a small sum to prevent being cut off and then a larger bulk amount based on what we calculated we owed them working from meter readings. the problem is that they are not sending us quarterly bills despite repeated asking for them!!!

The energy Ombudsman seems a good first step. Ill look into that Thanks all

Robin9

I took my Business Supplier to the Ombudsman who ruled in my favour.

Don't wait for any dispute letter.