I have moved out of a house, to another house, with a different supplier.

I gave Scottish Power plenty of notice, submitted final readings, and of course they are due me a shade over £100 due to their interest free loan from the customer model of billing.

The 10 working days during which they had promised to send me the refund passed, so I called.

The woman on the other end of the phone tells me that they can’t refund me the overpayment until they have notice of the meter readings at my new house, a whole other property, from my new supplier, who isn’t Scottish Power.

That can’t be true – surely ?? How can they justify that, either legally in terms of fair processing or just in general as good customer service. I suspect it is just another tactic for holding on to your money for longer.

Complaint email sent.

Anybody else had this flannel from Scottish Power ?

Try ringing again and talking to someone else? I can’t see what possible relevance your new property is, or indeed, what business it is of theirs even.

Tell them you’ve become a traveller and don’t have mains-fed power, see what they do then.

Or tell them you’ve moved in with family?

Anybody else had this flannel from Scottish Power ?

Not from SP but had similar from EDF. Just keep pushing with them as they are taking the michael and it has nothing to do with your new property as you’re with a new supplier there.
All these firms are thieving bastards and I have to work with them daily

I kind of thought so, but I am quite quick to lose my patience with this type of thing.

I thought there might be some obscure electricity regulation or something.

Cheers people – will return to Def Con One.

Cheers people – will return to Def Con One

Def con one means nuclear war is imminent, that’s a bit of an overreaction

You’ve not met Hels?

Scottish Power’s IT and customer service is in meltdown – it took them 5 months to resolve my query. Not a difficult one. They were told to stop taking on new customers at one point till they could handle the ones they had. Try this if you get fed up with them… http://www.resolver.co.uk/

They seem to be quite efficient at taking people’s money, funny how what is always the last service to have problems.

There is also Def Con Zero – nuke them from orbit – its the only way to be sure !

Scottish Power are appalling. You have my sympathies.

S P are worse than useless. I have charge of my mum’s house supply — she was in credit by quite a lot, I realised this was due to them never having logged an initial leech meter reading. Emails, contact forms, no use – eventually spoke to someone who did escalate it – but in mean time, it was “can you give us a reading from Nov 2013 so we can initialise the system” WTF?!!

Needless to say when the contract is up for renewal, I will not renew mum;’s house supply with them. Nor, in fact, ours – as they messed up setting up *our* supply as well, eventually on a much inferior Dual Fuel contract for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. What a shower 🙁

Even EDF were better, but think will go for a smaller supplier for a change. – ideas?

Are scottish power part of Eon? As eon are complete shitbuckets. even one of the customer service bods said on the phone we and sp are complete shitbuckets. Thinks she was about to leave. Jill was cool!

Try OVO – they pay you in credit and cheaper. Massively helpful. Want a referral coupon?

SP are part of Eberdrola

Not used any of the big 6 in years as they are all thieving bar stewards with pitiful levels of customer service.

Been happily with OVO for about 4years now and prior to that Ebico.

steve – may take you up on that – mum’s contract due at end of this month.
It’s that or ecotricity I think. Not all of them were up to dealing with properties up here though.

Big bizzz , dont ya just lovem

Callum – drop me a note on FB or the other place or something. There’s a few quid in it for both of us, but I wouldn’t recommend them without a clear conscience 🙂

🙂

Get on the phone and demand your money back – they are obliged to do so

If they are unwilling to do the transaction there and then report them to Ofgem…

With them for gas, perhaps I ought to switch pre-emptively.

I refuse to pay any of these companies by direct debit, I pay promptly when the bill arrives and they generally give me the same discount as if I paid by DD, and I haven’t had to provide them with an interest free loan for years on end!

Greenstar are good at customer service.

We’re with SP and as soon as our 12 months is up will be swapping.

Towards the end of Jan we got a letter from them telling us they were putting our DD up from £64 a month to £127 , at this time we were £48 in credit(halfway through the winter period). Mrs carlos rang them to say she wasn’t happy with the increase especially as we were already in credit. The SP operator agreed with her and suggested that we could also be placed on a better tariff and would only need to pay £57 a month we agreed and they said they would cancel the higher DD payment/set up the new.

On Feb 1st £127 was removed from my wifes account! , SP said they couldn’t refund from their end so we had to do a chargeback via the bank .SP were rung back and the £57 DD for Feb was paid via card , we were told the dd would be set up for the correct ammount for Mar 1st. On Feb 5th we recieved a letter that the DD would now be £69 (we just left it at that amount).

At the end of Apr we recieved a standard rate estimated bill from SP for £353 despite us providing them monthly readings 🙄 .Mrs carlos gets onto the blower to question WTF is going on. Apparently they presented for DD but it was declined due to insufficient funds (from a 4 figure bank account)and this is why we were placed on the higher rate tariff , the operator was insistent we were at fault and was fairly aggresive towards mrs carlos. The call lasted 90 minutes while the operator checked the setup details and the conversation went backwards and forwards it was suggested we check with the bank as to what had happened. At the bank they told us a DD was set up for £57 then cancelled 2 days later and another set up for £69 that was also cancelled 3 days later.

The next call to SP was to let them know it was their cockup which they still contested up till the point where we suggested maybe they would like us to forward copies of the statements detailing their errors. At this point we were told they would set up another DD but we would have to clear the balance owing first and they would sort out a refund after their dispute team had reviewed the account(could take a month but it’s only a few quid difference) but we would hear from them within a week.We refused to pay up front as it was SP’s error.

After 2 weeks we’d heared nothing so call no3 , luckily this operator had a clue what was going on and backdated the tariff (£97 less than the original bill) and we’re paying them £47 a month . At least we will be if they’ve managed to set the DD up properly. It’s taken about 5 hours on the phone and an hour in the bank to sort , SP are a complete shower of shite and we’re off elsewhere ASAP.

Phew essay post.

Tell them you’re moving to Mali. Your new address is 1 High St, Timbuktu. Your meter reading is 12345.

Well I have some progress with my email headed COMPLAINT – they have dropped the whole “we need new meter readings from your new house and supplier” line.

Now I am getting – “you haven’t provided final readings” – which I did, so did that again.

They are now on “you cancelled your DD” – yes I did, my account is significantly in credit and it was due on the last day of supply. What would you have done ? Why would I give them another £70 to fail to refund to me ?

So they are getting desperate now, the last email was “we have encountered an invoicing error on your account please give us 5 days and we promise we will sort it”.

Aye right.

Are there any good suppliers ? The new house has Scottish Hydro – they can’t be any worse ? Can they ?

Had a look at comparisons sites back in September 14 and calculated that even paying the penalty clause we would be better off switching to another supplier from Scottish Power. Mrs JWT gave them plenty of notice and duly switched to the new supplier around December. Once the penalty was taken from our account we were still owed £400. It took a concerted Twitter, Facebook and email campaign and four months to finally get our money back. Shocking service and appalling attitude to the customer only matched by One Call (actually many calls!!).
Good luck.

SP are bad, even by big six standards. They were recently banned from taking on new business until they’d cleared their backlog with the ombudsman.

Have previously helped my mother take two of her accounts through the ombudsman, now doing my own.

My only suggestion is to only deal with them via email. This doesn’t work either, but it’s cheaper and less time consuming than phoning. Escalate it to a complaint ASAP, then sit it out for 8 weeks until you can take it to the ombudsman, which is another very slow process but at least they’re human. Of course, the fact that I owe them quite a lot of money (probably – it’s hard to tell until they send me an accurate bill…) makes the slow resolution a bit easier to deal with, plus £120 compensation helps too.

I was with Scottish Power, went to Npower just to get a better deal really. Promptly went back to SP.

Npower are horrific.

I can vouch for Npower being shit beyond belief.

My tariff with First Utility runs out this month, they started off great, took on too many customers and are now diabolical.

If someone wants to forward me an OVO link I’ll consider them against the other suppliers, email in profile.

It has to be one of the most frustrating things in modern life. Its so simple, box on the wall has a number on it, you pay them number x fee. How companies can get that simple exercise is so wrong is baffling.

Noticed that our SP account was in credit (over £600 – should probably have been keeping an eye on this sooner). Just phoned them up to arrange a refund, got through with no waiting time, refund arranged and direct debit amount reduced too. Need to make sure that refund comes through and DD is changed, but overall a positive experience.

Need to check if I can get a better deal elsewhere though!

The new house has Scottish Hydro – they can’t be any worse ? Can they?

Haha. Just as bad. Shocking experience with them, going on for 7 months now and no closer to being resolved.

N Power are worse than horrific.

I’m currently with Good Energy for dual fuel. Very pleasant to deal with, and I’m doing my bit for the environment (apparently)…

How companies can get that simple exercise is so wrong is baffling.

Blame Thatcher.

Seems like a good place to ask this question:

We moved house last September and I did the ‘moving home’ thing with British Gas, as they were the supplier at our old place and it seemed like the most straightforward thing to do. Naturally, they ballsed it up so I spent plenty of time on the phone trying to get it sorted.

EDF were the supplier when we moved in, and British Gas managed to get as far as notifying EDF they’d be taking over the supply. Final bill came in from EDF, paid that, job done. In my mind, and based on the email communications, British Gas are now supplying our gas and I pay them by direct debit.

A couple of weeks back, I checked the bank account from which the DD should be coming. British Gas are taking a DD for electricity (which is correct) but not one for gas. So, in short, I’m currently getting gas that I’m not paying anyone for, and have been doing for months. I’ve checked and BG are definitely the supplier. There’s no demands coming through the door, nothing.

I realise that this needs to be sorted, but I’d like it to be to my advantage, so I’m trying to figure out how best to engineer this. I don’t have the final reading from EDF ending / BG starting the supply, but I *think* it might be approx. 100 units back from whatever is on the meter at the moment. Ahem. I’m assuming they won’t have the figures themselves so will need to rely on what I tell them.

Just for reference of the quality of their customer service, they sent me an email which contained both of the following lines:

For gas, as you’ve asked to stay with us

As you’ve not had gas with us before

I would estimate I’ve wasted an entire day of my life dealing with BG’s mistakes over the years, so I’m keen to try and ensure this situation works out to my benefit.

When we moved into this house it was with Scottish Power and they tried to insist I either had to pay the £100 up front or set up a £100 a month direct debit.

Since I intended to switch suppliers immediately I had no intention of doing either, I explained that I was happy to pay for the electricity, but not to pay up front and then try and claw it back. Wasn’t good enough apparently, in the end I just refused to supply any details, and swapped to Eon who I gave my initial readings to so never heard from SP again.

Had the misfortune of dealing with SP in a rented flat on economy 11 tariff. Economy 11? No, they didn’t know either despite being the sole provider (at the time). Similar story of clawing back money till we ended up with eon who were better but eventually not cheap enough.