Right, advice sought

Npower have now failed to setup a direct debit 4 times in a row. The 1st time I was partly to blame as I did not check the funds were leaving the account, this left us with a huge backdated debit of over £300.

Each time since then we have received a reminder letter stating that we have missed payments again despite being told it was sorted on the phone. The debt has obviously increased rather then gone down.

They are taking the piss, I have to ring them yet again later today and any advice on how to approach would be appreciated.

Er pay then the money they have not taken?

Have you got power – if so, it’s just an administrative cock-up.

It’s an administrative cock up that is occurring every single month.
They are not taking the agreed payment each month which in turn is increasing the money owed.

I don’t want to give them £400 in one lump sum, partly because they have systems that clearly don’t work and partly because it’s £400

But you haven’t paid anything and you owe them money. Pay the bill and then try and sort out the dd

I haven’t paid them the money because they haven’t taken the money, that is the doing of Npower, I have gone to the effort of setting up a dd payment plan 4 times to give them their sodding money.

Negative marks for lack of capitals and no use of multiple exclamation marks. Rant: 3/10

All big energy companies are a shower of poo. Refer them back to your previous conversations. Offer to pay, but only by direct debit, taken on a date of your choosing (payday +1 is good) and spread out amongst your other payments. They have to offer you a payment facility that suits your needs. Go through their complaints procedure then threaten them with raising a complaint through offgem (they get charged quite a bit for this).

Their letters will be entirely automated. Don’t let them rile you – there’s better things to worry about.

Had this exact issue with first utility, they set up a 12 month payment plan for the owed amount to ease the hit, you could try for this?

I worked in energy consultancy (business not domestic) for a number of years and Npower are particularly shit on admin and service in general. That’s saying something for the energy industry since the bar is pretty low.

Obviously you will have to pay what you owe them for consumption – you can’t really get out of it, but they should agree to a sensible payment plan – say to pay off the arrears over the next 6 months.

Then switch supplier. I find OVO are pretty competitive and actually have reasonable customer service. But if you go onto the free Which? Switch website linked below you can look at your options. Just make sure you put in accurate numbers for your consumption.

http://switch.which.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQiA7tCjBRDulMny5rfM0dkBEiQA7fcshflOVbw-_vY_q68XbV4xaPv7bctT58I1oAwqOzL3nLgaAga88P8HAQ

All big energy companies are a shower of poo. Refer them back to your previous conversations. Offer to pay, but only by direct debit, taken on a date of your choosing (payday +1 is good) and spread out amongst your other payments. They have to offer you a payment facility that suits your needs. Go through their complaints procedure then threaten them with raising a complaint through offgem (they get charged quite a bit for this).

Had this exact issue with first utility, they set up a 12 month payment plan for the owed amount to ease the hit, you could try for this?

This is the problem chaps, I have done this. The last 3 attempts to setup a dd has included the owed amount on top of the newly generated bills in a payment plan.

Go through their complaints procedure

Honestly you’d be better off paying them the lump sum (if you can) and switch supplier asap.

Had the same thing with British Gas. Had a dd setup for a repayment after they cocked up too many times to mention. It seems every couple of months they then decide to cancel that plan and try to take the full amount so I have to start again.

Mount a dirty protest in the foyer of their corporate headquarters

Npower are without a doubt the biggest shower of ####s that I have had the displeasure of dealing with. Ever. Worse than BT!

Got a statement in August after a meter reading saying that we had £530 credit and they wanted to reduce our direct debit as a result. We said that we would like to maintain our DD at £150 and have the £530 refunded.

August : Nothing

September : No refund. Direct Debit adjusted by them to £15

October : Direct Debit put back to £150. No refund. Apparently refunds over £500 require clearance so we asked for £500 instead to make it easier.

October 2 weeks later : Still no refund. They had managed to “un tick” the refund box.

November : Still no refund. No explanation, but they would give me my money in 3 to 5 working days.

November 2 weeks later : Still no refund. Can’t issue a refund without a meter reading! Asked for it to be escalated as I had had enough and was told that under the circumstances I could have a refund as a priority.

Moaned about it on Twitter and one of their CyberPolice got on the case. I should get a refund this week, but the person that I had spoken with had not ticked the refund box.

3 months to give me back what is mine. No apologies. No creditable excuse for not doing it.

If I owed them £500 and had spent 3 months fobbing them off I suspect that when I flicked the light switches nothing would happen.

An utter shower of arseholes.

…and relax.

Harry

If it makes things easier could you ring them back and tell them to use your money to cover my bill? I will then setup a dd to pay you each month.

Job done

Right you two! You know what to do…..

Harry – we’re having the same problem, they won’t actually pay us the money they admit to owing us. The only consolation is that every time we ring them, the amount has significantly increased. It’s like a really high interest savings account that you can’t get your money out of!

Top tip about Twitter shaming – we’ll try that next.

Another vote for paying up and moving to Ovo – no complaints with their service or pricing, been with them a few years now.

NPower sent me a bill for over a £1000 for the last 7 years I have lived in my house. Thing is, I’ve always been with Scottish Power. Phoned them & told them.

Received a letter today from them saying they are cancelling any bills over 12 months old. Phoned them again.

….awaits next bill….

Harry – we’re having the same problem, they won’t actually pay us the money they admit to owing us. The only consolation is that every time we ring them, the amount has significantly increased. It’s like a really high interest savings account that you can’t get your money out of!

I asked for the interest that they owe me to be added to the refund and they got really shirty with me. 😀

I wouldn’t go anywhere near npower, their billing system is a joke. Despite being hundreds in credit they continued to increase by DD every 3 months, in the end they wanted to increased it to £110 per month for dual power. This is for a two bed house which we’re never in during the day and away most weekends.

With EDF now and paying £60 and in credit.

Be very careful indeed. Document correspondence etc

Last time I had this type of problem (with BG) it took me approximately 30-40 phone calls and 6 months.

It started as a DD issue and escalated into a debt collection nightmare through the sheer boneheaded incompetence of BG.

Net result was BG offering me free unlimited electricity for a year as compensation but I honestly would have rather not had the stress in the first place

Got sent an article from consumer action group this morning. You might want to look in their forums. Found them very useful when dealing with banks in the past. linky

I had to wait over four months to get a refund from Scottish Power, they owed me over £400. Nothing I could do or say made any progress.
I have a hilarious trail of emails, various departments passing my case around and accidentally copying me in.
In the end I phoned Citizen’s Advice, they got Ofgen(?) on the case.
Finance Director phoned me personally and the money was back in my account within the week.
Good Luck!

As someone else said abuse them on twitter and the problem will be sorted much quicker. However my advice would be to switch supplier now as they really are awful, no worse than awful, truly incompetent at a level that words cannot describe. Yes, npower, you are incompetent and should have your licence to supply revoked.

So the money that you owe, that they haven’t taken, is sitting in your account?

If that’s the case, just pay them the money (they can probably take a payment on a debit card) to clear the arrears on the account and start again. The chances are that your account has got screwed up from the multiple billing changes, the time lag needed when making DD changes (not, incidentally, NPower’s fault, it’s how the DD schem works) and the fact that it’s in arrears. It’s probably got it’s electronic knickers in a royal twist. Pay off the outstanding amount in one go and it’ll all (probably) sort itself out.

Yes, they should be able to sort it all out for you, but for the sake of one phone call and a manual payment you may be able to help the process along.

Npower, BG, Scottish Power – all to be avoided if possible. Best of the big ones to deal with are Eon who actually have a half reasonable customer service. But the smaller providers like Ovo are better as they worked out a few years ago that there was a big hole in the market.

The UK Energy industry is bordering on criminal. As a domestic customer you do have some reasonable protection, but small businesses can seriously get ripped off if they trust the supplier.

Declaring an interest straight off here, I work for E.ON but in the generation arm, not the retail bit.

However, as Moshimonster says, our retail business really is focussing on customer service and we’re pretty cheap at the moment too. It may not sound great but we have an NPS (which is a customer feedback score) of ZERO at the moment, but we were well into the minus’s before and all the other big 6 are still stuck there.

NPower and SSE are very close to being told to stop recruiting new customers until they get their billing sorted. OVO and FirstUtility are a reckoned a bit better by Which, but of course as they get larger they may well find it harder to keep that up.

Yes, they should be able to sort it all out for you, but for the sake of one phone call and a manual payment you may be able to help the process along

I suspect as soon as you start doing manual payments you lose your Direct Debit 10% discount.