Disputing a gas bill, what rights do we have??

[ChatterMonkey]

So a bit of a long story... we pay our gas and electricity on a monthly basis, on receipt of bill, and it gets paid straight away. Gas bill is normally around £30-£40 a month. Up until may where we got a bull through for £80, then another for £190 a few weeks later.

Looked into it and it was basing it on estimated readings, despite us having a smart meter (gen1) so we phoned up to query, they asked us to get a meter readin, and the meter is dead.

They arrange an engineer to come out. Amd they say that he will be able to get a final meter reading from the dead meter despite the screen not working. Engineer arrives, fits new meters but says if a meter is dead there's nothing he can do to get a reading from it.

So we should be fine going forwards with a new meter, but no idea where we stand with the historical bills that are massively higher than our normal, but neither us or british gas can get evidence of actual consumption, so they can't prove that we have used that much, but we can't prove that we haven't iykwim.

Also, what is meant to happen when a meter dies/stops working? Google seems to imply that the supply should shut off but that obviously hasn't happened.

Do you think we have grounds to dispute the estimated bills? Or once the dead meter is sent back to them (does it get sent back?) Can the manually extract a reading? And if so, should we be asking for evidence of this?

You absolutely can query it, and they should have a procedure for it.

Ours wasn't gas but water. There was a leak in the mains pipe under our garden that wasn't picked up for some time, and when it was (by the man who came to read the meter and saw it whizzing round), the bill would have been about 7 grand! They cancelled that and based a revised bill on our actual usage over the previous couple of years.

So the gas people should be able to look at your actual readings back over a period of time and come up with a reasonable charge.They absolutely cannot force you to pay an estimated bill when they have no way of backing it up with actual readings because the meter had gone wrong. They should have realised there was a problem with the meter anyway, because it wasn't providing smart meter readings.

Rather than focusing on the £ amount of the bills, can you compare the kwh usage for the same period over the last few years? Prices have skyrocketed, so previous bill £ amounts aren't a useful comparison.