No wonder EDF energy is having a record year

The BBQ Pit
1

…for complaints.

I’ve had a bill for £200 that arrived not all that long after I’d paid the previous one, so I thought I’d make them wait as it was pretty near Christmas.

The money was put to one side, today I decide I’d better get this weight out of my mind and pay it off.

The auto-phone whatever system kicks into life, and informs me of my balance £0.00, wtf???, must be something wrong here.

Call again and get an operative, upon whom no blame can be apportioned. Turns out that what I have, that looks identical to a bill and has instructions for payment, including a bank payment slip, is not actually a bill at all. This letter is telling me to call in my meter readings or this will be amount of the next bill.

I read this letter a few times, nope, still don’t see it - perhaps I’d better get on and do that English grammer course I keep meaning to do. I read it out aloud to the operative, her translation is exactly the same as mine, maybe we are both needing the English grammer (I tend to write too passively and split some participle and other stuff I can’t put a proper name to).

Absolutely nowhere on the letter/bill does this mention that no payment is to be made, sure looks like a bill, wording says a payment is to be made, and how to go about it.

I ask about previous bills, perhaps I’d already paid it and forgotten, (Yorkshire folk do not tend to forget money so I kind of doubt it) Nope, there is no amount that remotely resembles the amount on this…er… unbill, notbill, billessness (c’mon help me out here)

I then enquire when my next bill is due, turns out this is a couple of weeks into March, which means that between bills I have a period of 5, nearly six months, and these are winter months too - effectively 2 bill amounts in one go. That will be a tidy sum.

Why is this happening? Dunno, and neither does the operative and so, feeling like an extra from a comedy show I state,

“I wish to make a complaint”

Why have I been sent a bill thingy which isn’t? why has the billing period been changed, doubled without any notification? and why do you expect me to provide you with meter readings when you employ staff whose role is to do nothing else?

There is little vitriol here, no swearing at an unfortunate drone, but at a time when energy prices in the UK are reaching wage escape velocity during a year when most folk here haven’t had a pay rise in the last 12 months and the prospect of very little over the next couple of years, you might think that megacorp would consider their public relations.

They are going to call me back, complaint has been officially logged. Lets see what happens.

regards

Dave of the unbilled

2

So you’re complaining about the fact that you don’t owe EDF £200?

If it makes you feel better, you can always send me the money.

3

I think all the meter readers are pining for the fjords…

4

I am also having problems with EDF. I have been in this flat about 7 months now, gas and elecric from EDF, and I have yet to receive a proper bill! I sent them meter readings, with photographs, soon after I moved in and (after some back and forth) I got assigned a billing number and can see my account on their website, except that there are no bills there! I have had meter readers round on two occasions but the only bill I have received (some months ago now, but well after the first meter reader’s visit) was an estimated one for £30. I paid that, but now, months later, it still shows up on my account web page as a credit. I get other mailings occasionally, but none of them asking for money.

It is quite nice, in a way, getting all this free gas and electricity, but I am scared that one day I am going to get some huge bill that I will not be able to pay.

I can’t get through to them on the phone. I either get stuck interminably on hold in voice controlled phone-tree hell, or simply get cut off. I have written to them through their horrible email web form (that only allows you a handfull of characters, so you can’t explain properly), to which I have got bromidic replies, but still no bill.

What is wrong with this company? Don’t they like money? Bill me for fuck’s sake! Are you trying to lure me into bankruptcy?

5

Does Arthur Dent live near either of you? I seem to recall that he only had trouble with his utility when he paid his bill, at which time they invariably cut him off.

6

That’ll teach you to mess with the Esperanto Defence Force.

7

I don’t understand the problem. If you could afford to pay monthly bills as they came along, couldn’t you just put that money aside for when they do straighten out their billing issues, and charge you for a year or so all at once? So yes, it will be a “huge bill,” but you’ll already have the money ready to pay them.

8

I’ll top the OP. We had a bill from British Gas which stated on official letterhead that “your account is paid in full. Thank you for being a British Gas customer.”

Fast forward two years. A letter from the UK arrives from British Gas to our US address, which claims we owe about a hundred pounds. We send a letter back and include a copy of the letter which claimed our account was paid in full.

Months pass. Then a collection letter arrives from an agency in the UK, which among many other things claims that we are delinquent and owe something like an extra hundred in interest. It also claims if we do not reply within 3 days from the date the letter was signed, we will be taken to court and our bank accounts seized. We note with amusement and horror that the letter is dated 7 days prior to its postmark. :rolleyes:

So we spend time on the phone, telling the collection agency that we have a letter saying our account was paid in full. The rudest, most nasty-ass motherfuckers I’ve dealt with on phone call me a liar and demand I send a check. Instead I send a notarized copy of the “paid in full” letter.

Further, we call British Gas and tell them to call off the agency. We send them a copy of their own letter. They claim “there’s nothing we can do once it’s turned over to collections; your options are pay or go to court to show why you shouldn’t pay.” (click)

Months pass. Then a notice arrives which says we are going to court. Enraged, I phone them up. The gist:

  1. They received the letter claiming the account was paid in full.
  2. The letter is “invalid” as it is not the original.
  3. A US notary public has no meaning in the UK, therefore the letter is “probably a forgery.”
  4. Here’s the capper - they stated that even if the letter was legitimate, as far as the collection agency is concerned we owe the debt, and we can “feel free to have our solicitor argue our case in court.”
  5. They threaten again to put a lien on our house there, and “freeze all your bank accounts.”

More calls to British Gas yield nothing. Contacting a UK ombudsman yielded nothing. Our options are:

  1. Pay the hundred pound dept to make it go away. They will graciously forgo the interest, but there will be a 25 pound “processing fee.”

  2. Hire a solicitor for a few hundred pounds and spend a thousand pounds or more to fly to the UK.

  3. Allow them to seize our assets. Maybe. We don’t actually know what they could do, but searching online at the time and asking people seemed to show that at a minimum they could cause our accounts to be frozen, claiming (falsely) that it was “suspicious” we weren’t in the country at the time, and we may have “fled” to “escape judgment.” :rolleyes:

We picked door number 1, and felt like shit. We did it under the condition that the collection agency send us a notice in writing that all debts with British Gas were forever paid off. They agreed to do this in writing, then reneged on it and said “we don’t control what British Gas does; we’re not promising anything, and we don’t care what that letter we sent you said. Take us to court if you want to.” (click)

This was one of the main reasons we sold that house. Mercifully we never heard another peep about the deal.

9

I receive a return call from a manager type person, who tells me there is some sort of lock on my account, his range of possible causes scan from, ‘glitch’ ‘computer migration’ to ‘I don’t know because I don’t get involved in accounts’

Fantastic. He asks if I can read the meters, bear in mind that they employ folk to do this, so its a service I am effectively already paying for. Its pretty dark and cold so I am not inclined to go tripping around in the undergrowth to get to the meters.

One day I may cut the hedge back, its overgrown but winter isn’t the time to do it.

This morning I get in the call queue and listen to some bloody idiot sawing away on a violin.

Different people on duty, however this time I have armed myself with them meter readings. I provide them, and am told that a real bill will be sent, turns out I now owe £325. Lordy, what would it have been if I had waited until the due time in March?

No way I want to wait for the bill, I want to get it paid now, whilst I have the money around I’d put by.

Back to the violin for a while.

Finally I get to pay, and then, I’m asked if I want to go direct debit - piss off! If this is how they perform, one thing I don’t want is to have their hands dipping into my bank account.
But I can get up to 6% off.

Go away.

10

EDF you say? British Gas? Heh.
We left a leased house after having “paid in full” (and having a statement saying so) only to get subsequent bills for at least a year from BG finally threatening us with cut off if we didn’t pay. Sent them a letter saying “go ahead” (as well as the ‘paid in full’ statement) since we hadn’t lived at that address for at least a year. Also sent yet another copy of the ‘paid in full’ statement to the rental management agency. Didn’t hear from them again. So, in fairness, it may have been the management agency that was incompetent… or perhaps it was both…

EDF was the company at our new residence. We noticed that the bill was strangely low, frighteningly low (these things do come back to bite you eventually) so looked it over carefully and realized they were charging us the night-time low usage rate during the day and vice-versa. hmmm. Contacted them. Read them the meter. Had a reader come out to the house. Changed the meter. Never did get it fixed. Oh well. :smiley:

The best part of all this is that in order to get a bank account in England (don’t know about the rest of Great Britain) you have to have a utility bill (like EDF or BG) in your name to apparently prove to the bank that you are legitimate. You have to have this even if all you wish to do is add a spouse’s name to a long standing account . Passports, UK identity cards, Immigration paperwork, notarized marriage certificate, Driver’s license (with address same as spouse), notarized letter from account holder stating that person is their spouse, personal appearance of account holder with spouse to swear they are who they say they are and are married and wish to have their name on the account, none of these will do - it must be a utility bill. Because the utility companies are the final word on whether or not you are a terrorist, or something…

11

Yeah right. I have been saving all my pennies, constantly aware that at some indefinite time in the future I am am going to get a bill of some indefinite size. :rolleyes:

A large part of what worries me about the situation is that as this is both a new flat and, for all practical purposes, a new country for me, I have very little feeling for how much my energy usage is likely to cost me, or how careful I need to be, until I get a bill. I have no idea how much money I ought to be “putting aside”.

12

This is not true for all banks. It is true that when I recently tried to open an account at Natwest with just a passport (and cash to deposit) and no utility bill, I was turned away by the receptionist, but the Barclays over the road gave me no problems.

13

Useless buggers are supposed to be replacing our meter. I spent 2 days in waiting for someone to come- some bloke did come round eventually, took one look at it, declared it was a 2-person job, and said they’d phone us back. That was over 2 months ago.

14

Shame you didn’t post about it on here before. You didn’t need to send a solicitor to court; you can respond yourself and you can even do it online. For free. (For civil matters, not criminal). I had to do this once myself.

Responding is half the battle. Often they threaten to take people to court and never actually do. When they do actually start a court case, they often don’t actually send anyone along, because that would cost them money and they know that the threat to go to court is often all that’s needed. But if you respond and they don’t turn up, then they lose.

The threats they were making were outright lies, btw. They can’t freeze your bank accounts or take your house or anything like that at all. Debt collectors in the UK actually have very limited rights; if they’re collecting for a govt agency like HMRC, they have more rights, but they still can’t summarily take everything you own, and British Gas is not a govt agency.

If you’d responded online with the facts you’ve outlined here, the case would have been thrown out at no cost to you.

Sorry if that sounds harsh - it’s not meant to. You have my sympathies. But if you ever get undeserved hassle from UK debt collectors again, ask on here or look online - there are lots of good resources available.

15

It was 10 years ago; there may not have been an online option.

We didn’t think they could take the accounts or house, just put a lein on them. We did talk to a solicitor, BTW, who told us “settle. It’s not worth my time and your money to fight this.”

16

That’s what i really hate about shit like this. Either you bend over for them, or you spend even more money proving they are wrong. It makes my blood boil.

There should be civil and criminal penalties for companies and debt collectors that do this sort of shit, and those penalties should include time-and-pain-and-suffering compensation to the wronged parties.

17

Oh, OK, yeah - ten years ago there might not have been that option or many online resources; I suspect there probably was an option to write to the court, but it’s too late to know now. The debt collectors still wouldn’t have had the right to do that for such a tiny debt that you’re disputing. I can totally understand your decision given the advice you received - I’m just a bit of an evangelist for fighting against lying, bullying, law-breaking debt-collectors.

18

Ah. Natwest it was. I always did think they rather sucked.

19

Barclays is better at giving bank accounts to people with less ID. Or at least it was about five years ago; back then I often sent foreign language students to Barclays after they were turned down by Natwest (and others that I don’t recall - I was a Natwest customer, so remember that). They were using Western Union for transfers instead, paying huge fees and walking around with tons of cash when they needed to pay their rent or tuition fees.

It was weird; they needed UK bank accounts to use to deposit funds from abroad, they had passports, visas, letters from the college, proof of regular income, all sorts of things, but no utility bills in their name, and they were asking for basic current accounts with no overdraft and no interest. The bank had nothing to lose and clearly, since another bank accepted them, there was no regulation saying they couldn’t accept them. Yet they were told no.

20

I thought that was Électricité de France.

“Stupeed English k-nighits! That will teach you to get your electricity from France!”