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Help needed with British Gas

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  • Help needed with British Gas

    I am hoping that someone can help me with huge problems we are having with British Gas and Sainsbury’s Energy.
    I will try to keep this as brief as possible as the situation has been going on for months on end and I’m at my wits end!
    I discovered last week that despite my accounts with British Gas being in dispute they have registered 3 delinquent accounts and 1 default on my credit file. It has taken my score from over 900 to 28 overnight.
    We moved into a new build property with a smart meter in 2015 we went with British Gas as they were coming up quite competitive, they told us to wait 3 months so that they could see what our usage would be even though we were on a smart meter. In short they made a huge mess of this and then ended up looking into it giving us £100 compensation for all the mess ups and we moved on.
    I really should have seen this as a huge red warning flag but naively carried on with them as a supplier.
    So a few months down the line and my partner is doing the banking and clearing down old unused direct debits and he inadvertently cancelled the one for British Gas. As soon as I noticed what had happened he went onto the app and spoke to an operator saying what had happened and asking them to re-instate the direct debit. The operator was adamant that the direct debit was not cancelled and despite my partner trying to protest otherwise they just said it was fine and would all come out as normal. So direct debit day comes and surprise surprise the direct debit isn’t taken because it is cancelled as we told them it was! We make a call this time but are told that we are going to be charged because of a failed direct debit. We tried over and over to explain (to people who spoke very little English) that we had tried to avoid this but they were not having it. So we were then told that the next amount that would be taken would be for the missed payment and the next payment along with the charges. Feeling that we had little other choice but the pay these charges we re-set up the direct debit and the agreed that the date would be the same. When it came to taking the money they tried to take far more than agreed so we stopped it going out of account and again contacted them. This is where all the fun begins because trying to speak to someone who understands or indeed cares at British Gas is like trying to contain the contents of an ashtray on the back of a motorbike…impossible.
    So we made countless calls and then re-contacted the manager who had dealt with the previous issues. He didn’t respond for ages and when he did he tried to tell us it was just our fault for accidently cancelling the direct debit despite the fact that we had tried to get it re-instated straight away. We decided we couldn’t deal with them anymore and said that we wanted the final bills minus any of their spurious charges and we were moving supplier. All the time this account was in dispute we sent countless emails to the manager, he denied having record of calls we had made and even said that he couldn’t get into the app to find our evidence (convenient). We have a screen shot of the reference number once we used the app and the operator told us the direct debit was fine but unfortunately we cant get back into the app as we had left. He often took weeks on end to reply and when he did he used an email address we told him several times was going out of use and to use the new one. Each time he responded he put a date on that we had to reply by or the complaint would be closed, I feel that the continued use of the incorrect email was nothing more than his effort to try and get this closed off. Anyway that situation went on and on and we said we wanted to refer the situation to the ombudsman and needed their final response. It took them months to issue this and when they did most of their ‘findings’ were inaccurate. So we referred to the energy ombudsman and I provided a long list of email chains where we had been ignored and where he had highlighted that the wrong email had been used on more than one occasion. The ombudsman replied but she had misinterpreted quite a lot of things incorrectly and it did not appear as if she had even looked at the evidence we had provided. She said that BG owed us an apology. I emailed her back highlighting what she had read wrongly and asking her if she had looked at the evidence, she emailed straight backing saying she will take it all into account now and we will hear back in 4 weeks. I am however now a little concerned about how much they even look into these situations as it seems that she really didn’t on that occasion.

    Whilst all this is going on BG are passing the account around to debt collection agencies like confetti. Some of them are rude and shout at us to pay, some just drop call, and others have a lot of sympathy for us and tried to communicate with BG on our behalf. I have never ignored any text messages, emails or voicemails they have left I have responded to every one in a effort to try to resolve this situation and we have always said that we will pay the bill but once it is correct. I even considered just paying it to get rid of them and try to get the charges back later but I was advised by several people not to do that as it means you have accepted the bills are correct.
    So in-between all this we went to USwitch and Sainsbury’s energy came up as a good deal, we called them and the lady there could not have been nicer, we explained all the issued we were having with BG and why we wanted to change and she assured us that loads of their customers go to Sainsbury’s and we will have a much better service with them. At no point in this call did she ever mention that Sainsbury’s were a trading name for BG and this was before the pricing loophole was closed. It was not advertised on USwitch and we blindly changed over to Sainsbury’s having inputted usage data from the BG bills. All went ok for a few months before we received two very confusing letters from Sainsbury’s energy regarding our gas and electric. These letters said that we are using less energy than expected and so our bills are going up. They were not going up by a small amount they were going up by nearly 400%! Thinking this must be a mistake I called Sainsbury’s energy to be told that no it was not a mistake it was correct having looked at our usage and the amount we were paying was not coving it. She could not or more likely would not answer the question as tp why the letter said we were using less than expected. She also then argued with me over a contract I had in front of me which said we were on a price freeze tariff. She was basically calling me a liar when I was looking directly at the contract. We went to speak with USwitch who couldn’t quite believe what was happening and gave us a list of questions about variable tariffs to ask them. We put these questions to the next operator I spoke to and she hung up! So called again this time demanding to speak with the complaints team and the lady gave confusing and vague answers clearly unable to actually answer them. When it got onto the issue of the contract again after a short argument and offering to scan it over to her she admitted we had been sent the wrong one and would just send us the one she thought should be correct and that benefited no one but Sainsburys! So after a long and tedious couple of weeks of arguing we decided to leave Sainsbury’s and went with Scottish Power who we have been with for nearly 8 months now and they have been fantastic.

    We asked Sainsbury’s to send us final bills which they never did, but when we spoke to operators about the amounts owed it included exit fees which our contract clearly stated we didn’t have to pay and feel what they have done is totally unfair. I have never ignored anything, these accounts are very clearly in dispute and all it looks like on a credit file is that you have missed loads of payments. It took about 4 days and I eventually got a reply from the executive complaints department allocating a member of the team to look into this for me. I received her reply today, she skirted over many of the issues I raised and said she couldn’t comment on the BG account as it was with the ombudsman which I think is fair enough. However in relation to the Sainsbury’s account she admitted the wrong tariff had been billed and that she was happy to honour the compensation and deduction of charges as her colleague had previously set out. She did however say we ignored an email asking for a response and so the complaint was closed. I have disputed this as I believe it would have been yet another time they used the email address we told them was no longer in use. She stated that it has always been clear that Sainsbury’s are part of the British Gas and this is on their correspondence and should have been on the USwitch site (It defiantly was not) She then said that she is confident that no data reporting errors had been made and they can only adjust a credit file where an error has been made.
    I have replied saying that I will speak with the information commissioner as the credit report doesn’t cant and doesn’t detail all the time and effort we put in to trying to resolve these problems. My credit rating has been destroyed just because I wanted them to sort out their errors and my creditors are now lowering limits on my credit cards and writing to me asking me if I can still afford repayments! I always pay everything on time and hardly every get turned down for credit if I apply for it. I got a default warning letter from Sainsbury’s and when I spoke to the lady who was handling the complaint she said the account was in dispute so not to worry. I never received one from BG but this is the account they have actually registered default on.
    Can anyone give me any advice about what to do next? Do I just have to accept this on my credit file despite them admitting errors and all the time and money I have spent trying to resolve this? One of the accounts is actually registered as ‘gone away’ which is not the case, we have not moved and they have our telephone numbers and email addresses and a log of contact we have had with them. One of the collection agencies contacted my partners business address saying they were looking for him for an unpaid debt, he was self employed at the time so got the letter and called them asking why they had done that when he had been in contact and we had explained the issues we were having. Her response was ‘we can do what we want’. This is like a nightmare we cant wake up from. It seems that if you just don’t agree with BG, their errors and their charges that they just hit your credit file.
    If anyone can offer any advice as to what I can do now I would be very grateful as I’m finding this all very difficult to cope with at the moment.
    Thank you for taking the time to read this very long post!
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