Anyone that's good at deciphering electricity bills (or just a bit more clever than I am)

[McQueensMuse]

I'm possibly being thick here but I cannot make head nor tail of this.

I changed suppliers in March/April of 2020.

I had called previous supplier to give readings and was in credit.
I paid what I'd estimated would cover until the changeover and heard nothing until I received a debt collection letter in November 2021 saying I owed £1200

Its been ongoing and ended up in court and I had a sheriffs officer at my door (am in Scotland)

They were very nice and advised me to get in touch with the solicitors who were dealing with it.

I did and their response is below.
It's as clear as mud to me and I don't know where to grow from here to be honest!

Dear McQueensMuse

Firstly, I apologise for the delayed response, I refer to the above matter and further to your telephone conversation with our office 15 June.

Our clients have confirmed that the principal debt is mostly a catch up bill from December 2019, as this was estimated meter reads and when meter reads were given in March 2020, these were significantly higher which did result in the catch up bill being produced. On this basis court action was raised on the correct balance. I detail the following breakdown below on how the balance was calculated.

16/5/19 Account has credit transferred on to it £185.72
11/6/19 Bill produced £93.03
Account in £92.69 credit
30/8/19 payment £10.56
Account in £103.25 credit
11/9/19 Bill produced £227.27
Account in debt £124.02
01/10/19 Payment received £130.00
30/10/10 Payment received £130.00
2/12/19 Payment received £130.00
Account in credit £265.98
5/12/19 Bill produced £229.97
Account in credit £36.01
31/12/19 Payment received £130.00
30/01/20 Payment received £5.00
3/03/20 Payment received £5.00
Account in credit £176.01
1/04/20 Bill received £624.26
Account in debt £448.25
Final Bill 01/05/20 £509.99
Account in debt £958.24

We trust this assists and look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards
SOLICITORS

All your relying on estimates created these, if you had kept on top of it by logging in and putting in your accurate meter readings or if that was a bind getting them to instal a smart meter so you didn't have to physically go online to enter them you wouldn't end up in the situation. Your online account will I assume only have estimated readings and if you have no other proof of meter screenshots,photos etc then your stuck. You would have also had emails regarding what you owed many of them, plus letters many of them long before you ended up in court even at a new address they would find you. The best thing in this situation is to first make sure your current account is up to date and second call your old supplier and see if you can either get the bill cut in half by paying a lump sum or a discount by paying it back monthly. Your very lucky they haven't asked for court costs,baliff costs to be added etc

Ah I see, I can't quite remember when in March I gave the readings but I did give them readings in late January/early February.

Ask your current supplier what the opening reading was and see if that matches the final bill from your previous supplier.

And it's really not unusual for utility companies to get the billing wrong so don't stress too much at this stage.

Write to the solicitors that you are looking into this but need the last two bills - copy bills, not just figures - in order to verify the position.

@Ladyj84 I'd been with SSE for over 20 years at that point and hadn't ever had any issues having them come out and reading the meter quarterly, So I really didn't feel the need to submit any further readings until January 2020 when I started to look into switching providers.
Smart meters aren't available in my area now never mind three years ago.

I received no emails from them as when I changed my email address in 2015 they entered it incorrectly.
I absolutely did not receive any letters from them and they definitely had my correct address (as that's where the debt collection agency got it from I assume, Also they had been out and switched my meters to different ones in 2016)

I won't be offering any payment at all until I have the kwh usage data for the last two full years from my current supplier and see how it tallies up against 19/20

I'll do that too, Thanks @Blistory

Hasn’t this already gone to court however and the utility company has a judgment in their favour? If so then not paying is simply going to mean you end up paying more.

@user701 it has already gone to court, Unfortunately I didn't get the notice so it went undefended at the time.
The solicitors who are dealing with it have agreed that something doesn't look right so have agreed to liase with SSE (that's where the bilss info above came from) I get the feeling that this isn't usually the case.

What everyone else is saying is correct, you need the actual bills. Copies from your old supplier and the first one from your new supplier.
Confirm the switch date and opening reading with your new supplier and you can check this tallys with the final bill from old supplier.
I would guess they continued to bill by mistake.

Given that you havent moved it should be easy to get in touch with your current supplier and find out what opening reading you gave them.

But it’s by the by. A judge has considered the case and made a judgment. They wouldn’t have done this without looking at the documents.

I've emailed them and asked for the readings and for my yearly usage data. They should get back to me next week.

I've just thought, maybe I should ask SSE for prior years usage data, maybe going back 5 years. That will (hopefully) show a discrepancy.

Irrelevant though. They have a judgment in their favour. Your time for arguing this has passed. They have no obligation now to waive the debt.

Plus just because I ate one biscuit a day for the past twenty years does not mean that I couldn’t have had a period where I ate a whole packet a day.

or in fact, (since your earlier bills were estimated), just because people thought I only ate one biscuit a day for the past twenty years doesn’t mean that I wasn’t actually eating five.

And energy companies have to bill for the correct number of biscuits, or they will certainly not be able to bill for 19 years of previous biscuit eating.

Irrelevant if they did not serve the court document correctly the first time.

If the court document wasn’t served correctly that would have been picked up at the hearing. It’s checked by the judge when a party doesn’t show.

Bulb had about two years of actual usage data and someone used to come and read the meters regularly. Then no-one came for ages, and when I looked back at their estimates for electricity it was for about half what we'd previously using on average. I'd actually been paying the right amount though and it just swallowed up the credit I'd built up.

It served to put me on notice that they just pull these estimates out of their arse, and put me on notice of their incompetence, which served me well later when they started to make up figures again even though I had a smart meter by then, and try to use me as a bank. Then not long after they went bust, with not very much of credit from me, just in case it took the company taking over a while to sort that out.

It won't have been done "in court", and there won't have been a "hearing", they likely just did an online money claim and whoever looked at it just believed whatever was submitted by the energy company at the time. I have obtained a CCJ through the online process, the defendant made no reply, and no-one from the court questioned their address details.

Even if done as an MCOL there is a process for checking service. The court sends out a court pack. That will show on the system. If the claim is uncontested this is checked.

But yes of course if the address didn’t match to the supply address it could of course indicate that the OP wasn’t served and potentially an application could be made to set aside the judgment.

Are you dual fuel? If so one could be gas and the other electric righting itself?

There does seem to be a pattern of you not saying attention to household administration. Make it your learning to check you bills, make sure email addresses are correct and don't leave things over years while you destroy relevant paperwork

Sorry to be patronising but this is the boring life we all lead and it turns out troublesome if you don't keep an eye on things

Also why did you suddenly drop down to paying only £5 a month? During winter months too. Clearly that was going to have an impact on what was owing.

No gas just electric.

During the phonecall in January when I gave my readings, I asked the customer service person to work out (roughly) what my usage would be until the end of March and given what I was already in credit by (using actual readings) £10 more should have covered it. I thought there may have been 20/30 difference but certainly not this much.

Hi op,

I worked for an energy company for 10 years so hopefully i can help with some advice. Though tbh, i’m not sure what’s been happening in the meantime when you say ‘it’s been ongoing’.

Where did you see that your balance was in credit, as the summary from the solicitors doesn’t seem to agree with this?

The PP that said that it is the company’s responsibility to bill you accurately is mistaken. Many energy companies have in their t&cs that it is the customer’s responsibility to provide meter readings (unless vulnerable).

The back billing rule mentioned by PPs doesn’t seem to apply to this situation, as the summary indicates you were billed at the right time in 2020.

Your statement that ‘you didn’t receive any actual bills’ isn’t correct and wouldn’t stand up in court as your bills were availble online and you would hve received email notifications when these were created, indicating you opted into paperless billing.

You say you called the previous supplier to provide your closing reads, but it doesn’t work like that. What happens is that you give your ‘opening’ reading to your new supplier, and they pass it through to your old supplier so the 2 companies agree on reads.

Some good next steps would be:

-As others have said, you need a history of meter readings from your old supplier, along with dates, and most importantly, whether these were estimated, readings you took or readings their meter reader took. Get these asap. This will give you a better idea of what happened eg if there was a long period of estimates, or if someone submitted an incorrect reading.

-Please contact your current supplier, if you can’t find it on your online account, to make a note of what your opening reading is, and then make sure it matches the closing reading on your old account. If it doesn’t, that may be the issue

-Comparing usage between years isn’t the most useful thing to do in this scenario tbh. Your circumstances or general usage may fluctuate, also dependent on weather, and it’s still the same meter registering that usage. So it more depends on whether accurate meter readings were taken and submitted.

If you can get this info in the next couple of days op, i am happy to help you further.

That's assuming that the documentation provided by the energy company is correct, and they do mess up. We moved, took a final reading, phoned npower, and their initial response was that we owed £2,000. As I was on the phone I challenged it immediately and sorted it there and then.

But if I hadn't known and it had gone to court without my present I would assume npower's paperwork would have looked fine.