Anyone requiring help in extremis would be well advised not to look to their energy company for a warm embrace. Last week I reported a mother’s struggles to stop E.ON debiting the account of her son who had killed himself.
Meanwhile, JL of York says the distress of a double bereavement has been exacerbated by British Gas. He and his sister were executors of his mother’s will and he took over her British Gas account while the estate was settled.
For months, bills were sent in the name of her estate to his address, while his sister, who lived nearer the empty house, would phone through meter readings if British Gas’s estimates didn’t tally.
Then, in December, things went horribly wrong. The account name was changed to his sister’s, although bills continued to be sent to his address. Shortly afterwards, his sister fell ill; she died in February.
“I informed British Gas of this, and of the sale of my mother’s property the following month,” he writes. “I submitted final meter readings for the gas and electricity, but only received a final bill for gas. I was told a discrepancy between the electricity reading I had supplied and the one on their records had been resolved, and a bill was on its way. In the meantime, they keep writing to my late sister, at my address, demanding £614.71. I have never been billed for this amount, which is far more than it should be for an empty house where the electricity has been turned off since last December. I wrote to complain but received no reply. Now they have passed on the debt to a debt collection agency.”
This is incompetence verging on callousness given the circumstances.
British Gas is keen to impress on me that the problems have nothing whatever to do with its new billing platform, which has been blamed for scrambling customer balances and triggering madcap bills.
It claims the account was changed to JL’s sister’s name via the online portal, which JL insists neither he, nor his sister, have had access to.
It blames a single adviser for neglecting to amend the account after his sister died, and insists that the debt arose because he was disputing the final gas bill.
This is nonsense: he paid the final gas bill in April. It was the absent electricity bill that caused the problems and British Gas that was disputing the readings.
Its claims are at odds with what it told JL in a letter after I had intervened. That stated that when the account was migrated to the new billing system there were “issues with the gas readings” which, along with unspecified “other factors”, prevented the account being updated when JL’s sister died.
Later, agents apparently tried to correct the readings but lacked the knowhow, since they spanned the new and old billing systems. Again, the company missed the point that it was the electricity bill that had not been settled. It was finally issued after pressure from me and, lo and behold, it revealed that JL owes £27.59, not £614.71!
Meanwhile, a cry for help from Cambridge, where RB is struggling to protect her sick mother from the madness of EDF. The supplier insists she has amassed a debt of more than £9,000 since January, despite having been £4,000 in credit last November.
“I am the live-in carer for my mother, who has schizoaffective disorder and a long history of self-harm and suicide attempts,” she writes. “She has been harassed by EDF over wildly incorrect bills, despite being flagged as vulnerable.”
The nightmare goes back to January 2022 when a new meter was installed by the council after contractors caused a gas leak, and the meter reference was not updated on the account.
EDF failed to log updated meter readings, or flag apparently wild discrepancies in consumption. It failed to respond to complaints or question conflicting bills.
In August last year, it emailed RB’s mother out of the blue, despite notes on the account stating that correspondence should be sent to her carers, blithely announcing that her monthly direct debit would increase sevenfold from £191 to £1,310. “This caused a mental health crisis and self-harming episode,” writes RB. “She did not see the point in living.”
RB’s mother cancelled her direct debit to prevent them emptying her account and RB submitted a formal complaint, but EDF refused to log it, claiming erroneously that she was not named on the account.
Then threats of legal action over the alleged debt began arriving, and RB’s mother stopped answering the doorbell for fear of bailiffs. And that’s where matters stood when, in desperation, RB contacted me.
EDF thanked me for bringing the case to its attention, which implied it had hitherto been impervious to months of pleading. It had the bright idea of requesting current meter readings, whereupon it discovered what it had denied all along: it had overestimated the bills and the debt was £349. This was waived as a gesture of goodwill.
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• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978
