In April 2024, EDF Energy said I owed it £8,000 just for my gas. It promised to correct the error, but another £8,000 bill arrived. In August an adviser agreed something was wrong. I sent the unit details but seven weeks later I was told I owed £7,000. EDF has also not credited payments I have made in all this time.
F. C., Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs.
Energy bills are hard enough for households as we head deeper into winter and 10 million pensioners are denied the winter fuel allowance. But what makes it worse is the pain countless customers face to ensure their bills are correct.
I receive scores of emails and letters from readers struggling to get energy bill blunders put right, and this week I’ve decided to expose a snapshot of what I see.
Let’s look at F. C.’s case first. You tried to assist EDF by diligently collecting details of gas and electricity units you’d used over the two years since moving into your new home and calculated that the total – for both gas and electricity – should have been nearer £5,953.
Over the period, you had also paid the company £6,282 for both. You figured EDF owed you money rather than the other way around.
I urged EDF to turn up the dial on your complaint. A few days later it established what had caused the inflated £8,000, then £7,000, bill. Last April, it belatedly got your meter correctly ‘commissioned’ – that is, assigned to EDF under your address and name when you moved in – but its mistake was to then take the readings as if starting from zero, ignoring the previous owner’s usage with another provider.
EDF has now corrected the initial reading, rebilled your account, processed a refund and credited £100 as a goodwill gesture. A spokesman says: ‘We’re sorry for our mistake and that it wasn’t resolved sooner.’
Elsewhere, K. C., from Dorking in Surrey, was also embroiled in a battle with EDF. She was told in September that her electricity account was £5,154 in credit. It is a customer’s right to have a credit reimbursed on request.
When she chased this up, customer services blamed the size of the sum involved for the delay in issuing the money. Later she was told the refund was being processed, but still it didn’t arrive.
When I intervened, EDF sent an email which explained she wasn’t due a refund after all. It turned out her meter was broken, and the readings did not reflect her actual usage, leading to the phantom credit. EDF then tried to persuade her to have a smart meter installed – the kind that sends readings automatically to the provider – but she declined as she feared they were unreliable.
I asked EDF whether it would let her have a standard model instead. Suppliers are reluctant to replace these ‘legacy’ meters when they stop working as they are under government pressure to roll out smart meters to most customers by the end of 2025.
But in K.C.’s case it said it would make an exception.
£13,000 demand over mistaken identity
Meanwhile, in London, reader K. V., explained how he had moved into a two-bedroom rented flat in April 2023 after separating from his wife. He lives alone, but his two children often stay over. Since then, his annual Eon Next electricity bill has been about £780. But in October 2024, to his horror, he was sent a £13,000 bill by British Gas Lite.
A mistake or fraud, he assumed, but he could not convince British Gas Lite via its chatbot or emails, even though he provided evidence he wasn’t a customer, and he continued to be hounded for the debt. On K. V.’s request, his landlord disclosed his tenancy agreement to the supplier, which revealed the account in question was in the name of a food firm. Yet British Gas Lite still held our reader liable. He feared it would mean him losing his home and risking access to his kids.
When I asked British Gas to get to the bottom of this it took only a few days to figure out the error. Two properties are listed with the same address as his on the Land Registry – seemingly because his landlord split the property in two but never updated the register.
K. V. received a bill that should have gone to the other tenant – a business. British Gas Lite only offers tariffs to businesses, so this should have flagged up the problem for British Gas. The firm said it would follow this up with the landlord and apologised to K. V. for not sorting it sooner.
Up in Blackburn, Lancashire, a vulnerable customer was being chased by Eon Next for £600. A. M. wrote to me about her disabled 42-year-old son who, until February 2022, was a tenant in a supported living property – like a care home but where individuals have their own unit or flat and pay their own bills.
When the tenancy ended and he went to live with his family, A. M. notified all utilities at the time and paid his final bills. Despite this, a £600 demand was later generated to cover February to October 2022 – the period between her son leaving and the overall property finally being closed as a supported living operation.
As the last named tenant, her son had been chased for the bill a year ago, but on his mum’s intervention the debt collectors accepted he wasn’t responsible. However, a year on, the bill reared its head again and Eon set the hounds on her son anew. Eon failed to respond to her communications and evidence – sent via recorded delivery. She told me the stress was making her ill.
I asked Eon to investigate this, and it confirmed the account had been incorrectly opened in her son’s name after his tenancy had ended. This, it said, was due to the management of the accommodation he left informing Eon the lease for the property would be terminated in October 2022 – correct for the whole property, but not for A. M.’s son’s tenancy.
Eon has now wiped the bill and offered £100 as an apology for the upset caused. A. M. was mightily relieved but is still seething at Eon being such a mumpsimus (someone who stubbornly sticks to their guns despite being incorrect).
Sadly, mumpsimuses are widespread in the energy sector and beyond, and I am sure to be standing up to more of them in 2025.
Boots says it is aware of the scam. It advises customers not to click on any links and to delete the email.
First, forward the email to report@phishing.gov.uk to report it.
Straight to the point
I have not been able to get online for 12 days and it’s difficult to speak with a human at my provider TalkTalk. It blames another telecoms provider for the outage but that company says it’s TalkTalk’s problem. I’m going around in circles.
B .J., Bournemouth, Hants.
TalkTalk apologises and says the connection has been restored. You’ve been given £88 credit and half-price broadband for six months.
My husband died 12 years ago and in January last year I received a letter from a pension firm stating I may be entitled to his pension from a job in the 1980s. I sent the documents but I still haven’t heard anything from the company, which has since been acquired by another pensions firm. Why is it taking so long?
S. O., Wigan, Lancs.
The firm apologises for the delay and you have now received the £2,000 payout.
I bought Uggs from eBay in two sizes with a view to returning one. They were shipped from Ireland but the return address is in China. One pair has been confirmed as counterfeit. I was told to send them back by eBay before it can look into my case but I can’t, as it will cost £50 and I don’t have all of the seller’s details.
R. G., via email.
eBay apologises and says that you can file for a return under its ‘item not as described’ policy.
- Write to Sally Hamilton at Sally Sorts It, Money Mail, 9 Derry Street, London, W8 5HY or email sally@dailymail.co.uk — include phone number, address and a note addressed to the offending organisation giving them permission to talk to Sally Hamilton. Please do not send original documents as we cannot take responsibility for them. No legal responsibility can be accepted by the Daily Mail for answers given.
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