British Gas is causing me mental breakdown. I am a refugee and was grateful to be given a social housing flat. I duly informed British Gas, which supplies the gas on a prepayment meter and electricity, which was supposed to be billed. They sent me a new code and top-up card and I paid in £60. It turned out the previous tenant had left a £236 debt, presumably on the electricity account. British Gas siphoned off £54 and left me with £6 worth of fuel.
Over the following weeks I questioned my sanity because every time I rang customer services, it kept telling me over and over to do the same thing, kept claiming that the matter was resolved and kept refusing to register a complaint. One adviser told me the only solution was for me to pay the debt. When my gas supply twice cut out, I called the emergency line and technicians visited to apply an emergency credit. I was assured the debt had been decoupled from my account and was told it would take up to 42 days to refund me the money they had taken. I had to spend Christmas and new year without heating or hot water.
I transferred to Ovo, which, bizarrely, triggered letters from British Gas welcoming me as a new customer. The first time I used the Ovo card to top up, half my credit disappeared. Turns out British Gas had taken it against the previous tenant’s debt. British Gas said it couldn’t help as I was no longer a customer.
I have a government voucher of £150 given to people on low income. It will expire in a couple of days. My choice is to lose it or to donate it to British Gas.
LA, London
I’ve become pretty hardened to customer failings, but some situations can still cause me to seethe and yours is such a one. You first wrote to me in December. It was supposed to be a time of celebration, you told me, because after much hardship you had secured a flat and a job. But you felt unable to socialise with your new colleagues because, thanks to British Gas, you’d spent weeks without hot water to shower or launder. You said your flat was so cold you’d huddle in bed before and after work and you often spent money you could ill afford on takeaways because washing up was so difficult.
You suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, which is made worse by the cold, caught a chest infection during the weeks without heat, and say you became so stressed you were unable to eat. British Gas called you the day after I questioned its conduct, but only to state that it would refund you the £70 of your money that it had pocketed within 28 days. To me it merely declared blandly that it was sorry for the “upset” it had caused and would be offering “goodwill” on top of the refund.
The latter arrived in a misspelled cheque a week later along with an offer of £100. You and I agreed that that was derisory given your ordeal and British Gas upped it to £200, which you accepted. Had you not, I would have advised you to contact the energy ombudsman, which has powers to order redress and compensation if a complaint is upheld.
Although even an ombudsman ruling can be ineffectual. So impervious is British Gas to customer suffering that the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) sent me an SOS on behalf of MD, a disabled single mother trapped in a see-sawing billing nightmare since 2021.
“At CSE we have 45 years’ experience advocating on behalf of people with energy companies, and this is one of the worst cases we’ve ever seen,” it told me.
MD’s account balance has fluctuated wildly between -£4,000 and +£5,000, and despite an order by the ombudsman last November to recalculate it, she has yet to receive an accurate statement.
The fear is that if her alleged balance deficit plunges below £5,000, MD will be ineligible for a British Gas Energy Trust grant, available to indebted customers on low incomes.
The problems began when British Gas raised her affordable payment plan without warning, leaving her struggling to afford food and unable to heat her home in winter. She then discovered that her account was £1,000 in credit. That was in 2023. Since then she has received no bill and her online balance has switchbacked between improbable four-figure debits and credits.
When I contacted British Gas it blamed “human errors”. It was “human error” that prevented it issuing an accurate bill after the ombudsman ruling. This omission led, mystifyingly, to a credit of £5,068.59 showing on her account. It has now applied up-to-date meter readings to produce a debt of £1,285.32 which it has written off to gratify the Observer – I mean, MD.
And that’s it from me!
This is my final Your Problems column for the Observer. These last 13 years of sharing your pain have been a privilege and the cause of several white hairs. Best of luck to you all and THANK YOU!
