NPower gas 'sculpting'

anilsec

I rang npower on the 8/2/2009 to complain about my bill and said I would be looking for a different supplier, so the chap suggested another tariff and promised me it would apply from that day (after suggesting it took 3 weeks), when I said I might as well move then. I rang up Thursday to enquire if this had been done and was told no. The young lady then took my meter readings off me and definitely said it would be switched from the 12/2/2009 and when i enquired if it will be better for me as a low user she said yes as there is still February at the higher kwh rate, but tonight I get a letter saying elec switched to SOL 14 in 12/2/2009, gas switched to SOL 14 on 23/2/2009. This means that even i am frugal with my gas this month, they will still get their 882 kwh at high rate. I feel like I am dealing with gangsters !! I wish I was as knowlwdgeable as you lot out there.

DirectDebacle

Cardew wrote: »

My bet is, at least initially, they will quote the ofgem 'ruling' and refute the claim.

Are you on?

P.S.
A bet I will be happy to lose!

So my side of the bet is that they won't cite Ofgem and pay up immediately? Errr let me think about it for a second. No I won't take it.

What colour is the sky in your world Cardew?

meggsy

Did anyone see Watchdog last night .... I caught sight of a smiley Nicky Campbell announcing that 200,000 npower customers need do nothing because they will be contacted about their refunds :rolleyes:

The Ofgem ruling was a joke, unless they haven't finished with it yet !

DirectDebacle

meggsy wrote: »

Did anyone see Watchdog last night .... I caught sight of a smiley Nicky Campbell announcing that 200,000 npower customers need do nothing because they will be contacted about their refunds :rolleyes:

The Ofgem ruling was a joke, unless they haven't finished with it yet !

Yes. They were so busy congratulating themselves on a job well done and all the time blissfully unaware that 2m or so npower customers had been systematically overcharged by £50 or more each. Ofgem had not even bothered to look at that side of the issue.
I did contact Watchdog around early April 2008 re the sculpting but received no response. Trouble is with a programme like that is they don't want to devote more than 5 mins to a story. If sculpting were properly reported it would take up the whole programme.

Their piece, unfortunately, gave the message to anyone who thought they might have been overcharged (sculpted) now only has to sit back and wait for npower to post them their refund.

Ofgem will only investigate the complaints made to them by organisations, not individuals. The complaint they investigated was made by Energywatch (as was). I don't know how this complaint from Energywatch was worded but it seems like the sculpting scam was either not mentioned by them or not properly explained.

What a shambles.

Sterling

Question: When is a year not a year?
Answer: When it’s a “tariff year”.

Yes folks, I was dumb just like you; and - like you - I foolishly believed that a “year” meant 365 days (plus the occasional leap day). Also like you, I knew that Albert Einstein had shown that time is affected by high speed and strong gravity; and that a rocket to the moon and back loses around a couple of seconds. But I had absolutely no idea of the scientific breakthrough by those clever chaps at Npower, who have convinced Ofgem that even when I am sitting quietly in my own living-room, a year can be any period Npower wishes to make it. My – we live in a remarkable age don’t we?

But you know – I still can’t entirely free myself of the suspicion that despite Ofgem’s endorsement, Npower will not be awarded the Nobel Prize for science. In fact, I’ve just had a light bulb moment, and now I feel an overwhelming sense that Ofgem has let us all down badly. Here’s why.

According to its own website, “Ofgem monitors companies to ensure that they comply with European and UK consumer protection law”. Here we have a situation where through 2007 an estimated 2.2 million Npower gas customers were (deliberately) charged for more than the contractual 4572 high tier units over a year. What could be a more obvious case of a breach of consumer law than that?

The cost to repay these 2.2 million customers is estimated at around £200m. But Ofgem has let Npower off with only having to pay out a mere £1.2m.

Now that Ofgem has made its unexpected ruling, I can almost hear the raucous laughter in Npower’s boardroom from here - along with the sounds of champagne corks popping in rapid succession.

In other words, Ofgem has accepted Npower’s variable “tariff year” excuse (against all common sense) and narrowed the scope of its investigation to a token gesture.

Yet, if a “tariff year” doesn’t mean a proper year, but means a period of any length determined by a tariff or price change, why did Npower use the word “year” at all? Why didn’t it simply call it a “tariff period”? The answer must surely be that Npower did mean a year at the time, but has since chosen to deny it. Any reasonable person can see that the use of the word “year” is clearly a massive indication that Npower did mean a year, and it made no effort whatever to counter that meaning in any of its literature. In fact, as far as I am aware the term “tariff year” only surfaced when Npower was fending off claims.

Call me paranoid if you like, but I sense the hand of a massive cover-up on Ofgem’s shoulder. Npower has (in defiance of all logic) escaped having to repay its affected customers £200m, and merely has to pay a few per cent of those customers an average of £6 each; making a spectacular saving for Npower of around £198.8m.

Dare I even mention the word corruption? The idea may sound far fetched, but consider this. It was only the other day that we learned about top civil servants regularly accepting lavish “hospitality” from various companies, and that was just the stuff we know about. If I owned a company that stood to shell out £200m, I would be strongly tempted to pod out say ten per cent of it in bribes/hospitality instead. I’d then use some of the rest to buy peerages for myself and fellow directors; need I say more?

Even if you set aside my personal suspicions, the fact remains that Ofgem has clearly failed in its statutory duty to protect the public and to right the wrong that has been done in this instance; a £200m wrong. Consequently Ofgem has either deliberately ignored the actual issue here, or it’s been unacceptably incompetent. If it is the latter, it is not fit for purpose; if it is the former, it should fully account for its bizarre and perverse decision.

Sadly, this is not Ofgem’s only failure. Now that the price of oil has dropped to figures lower than before the excessive price rises of last year, Ofgem has still failed to force the energy companies to stop acting like a cartel and reduce their prices to fair and reasonable levels. The French capped their price increases why couldn’t we?

Where do we go from here? I do not see the Government stepping in; Npower is one of the few companies still making a profit – and paying tax. So you won’t see any ministerial review of Ofgem’s ruling here then.

I don’t see MP’s doing much either; and without government support, the Parliamentary Business and Enterprise Select Committee is powerless, even it was minded to quiz those in charge of Ofgem.

That only leaves a judicial review by the High Court - of Ofgem’s decision and the manner in which it arrived at it. I have no doubt that the High Court (where the entire matter would be openly thrashed out and an unbiased judgement given) would quash Ofgem’s overly-narrow verdict and order it instead to reach a finding in favour of the 2.2 million affected Npower customers, or at least order Ofgem to reconsider the matter properly.

Sadly, that sort of high court case would require an initial cash outlay of maybe three hundred thousand pounds give or take a hundred thousand. So it looks unlikely to happen.

Nevertheless, I daydream that if all (or many of) the 2.2 million affected gas customers could band together and chip in £1 each they would amass a realistic fighting fund. We could call ourselves The Npower Users Association. I for one would be happy to nominate Direct Debacle and Cardew to act as two of say four trustees of such a fund; to appoint a specialist firm of solicitors and a senior barrister or two, with a view obtaining a judicial review of Ofgem’s perverse ruling; and thus obtain a mandatory court order making Ofgem do the right thing and hold Npower to full account.

In the meantime, I wonder why decisions of bodies like Ofgem are made behind closed doors. Why can’t we be allowed to see how the decision making process was carried out? When judges make a ruling, they provide full and detailed accounts of their reasoning for all to see. It’s undemocratic if Ofgem and similar bodies don’t do the same.

Also, (as far as I am aware) the affected Npower customers were not invited or allowed to submit any kind of representation to Ofgem to assist it during its deliberations, though it seems clear Npower was. I consider that to be a breach of natural justice which alone, I suspect would be grounds for a judicial review – in addition the Ofgem’s perverse ruling itself.

DirectDebacle

Just spent ages on the DIY board chatting about whitewash but no-one on there understood what I was prattling on about.

KimYeovil

DirectDebacle wrote: »

Just spent ages on the DIY board chatting about whitewash but no-one on there understood what I was prattling on about.

Send Aunt Polly after Ofgem with a bundle of switches.

1carminestocky

Sterling, what an absolutely brilliant post! Has Martin commented on this ruling yet?

DirectDebacle

KimYeovil wrote: »

Send Aunt Polly after Ofgem with a bundle of switches.

Bumped into Great Uncle Bulgaria (I think he's a chemist) on the Tech board and he told me if you mix whitewash with natural gas you get a bubbly opaque mess which makes everything fuzzy, foggy and unrecognisable.

Sterling was correct. Some of npowers alchemy has rubbed off on Ofgem. Hard to believe but looks to be true:rolleyes:

KimYeovil

And I think everyone should contact Nicky Campbell and Watchdog this week and complain about their pathetically passive presentation of Ofgem's pronouncement. Totally unacceptable. Concentrate our ire.