To ask if you’re planning to refuse to pay energy bills?

[Gruffalocrumbles]

I’ve seen a few posts here and there on social media about collectively refusing to pay energy bills when the price hikes in October.

I was wondering if many people are on board/planning to do this?
(YABU = not refusing to pay, YANBU = refusing to pay?)

Most recent post I have seen is by a page called ‘dontpayuk’ on Instagram www.instagram.com/p/CghIfyeseTv/?igshid=YzAyZWRlMzg=

I am really concerned about how our household is going to manage to keep up with bills this winter.

Oh my god that was a DD price

it's being done as a PROTEST

a protest against what? Russian invasion? Rising Labour costs? Rising fuel What?

Last winter I could turn the heating off if I wore my fake oodie. Planning to do the same this winter.

I also make most meals in the oven instead of on the gas hob. My gas usage was significantly lower than the previous year, even with the higher tariffs this spring.

No I wont be doing that but as others have said I'll be cutting back a lot cause I'll struggle to afford our current usage in October. So the heating will only go on if its freezing cold this winter. Blankets and warm clothes will be used otherwise. Will do everything we can to reduce our usage.

I’m not prepared not to pay my bills.

My DM has had her gas and electricity bills moved from quarterly to monthly by her provider. DM paid one of her bills less than a week late and given a £10 fine for doing so. I don’t want fines or to risk a pre-payment metre.

Omigosh, imagine stealing from the fair , upright and ethically transparent energy companies. How morally reprehensible.

Also op beware rhe keyboard warriors encouraging others to do this whilst they secretly pay as they know full well the pain if they don’t. Don’t fall for it.

Are people actually reading the meters regularly and working out what they are using and telling their energy companies their direct debit is set too high or just accepting what the energy companies want to set it at I wonder . ScottishPower wanted £244 a month , I told them our circumstances had changed and i had made massive cutbacks and it was set too high . They weren't interested so I sent them a reading every fortnight without fail which proved our total gas & electric was £95-£100 a month . It's now set at £180 a month so I'm building up credit .last month I was £300 in credit so I asked them to put £150 in my account which they did .

Lost earnings? But they are always in profit, where are these supposed lost earnings?

I’ve worked really hard to get a good credit score for my mortgage etc.

The energy bills are going to be difficult but I’ll always pay

Tsk.

Those Saudi yachts don't buy themselves.

Surely this is just normal for winter vs Summer?! you naturally use less gas and electric as it gets warmer/longer days.

I wish more people would back this campaign. There needs to be tighter regulation on profit margins in these industries that supply essential services.
If we all refused to pay, they would be FORCED to reduce their profit margin, rather than hurting the consumer.

Yup. Half of people are sharing it on facebook like they would that post about lost dog in Alabama in 2010.... Not thinking.

Other part of people just wants to fuck with people by getting them in trouble

Protest as much as you like but they'll still cut your supply if you don't pay anything so then you'll be in the cold and the dark

Agree it’ll be to the detriment of people not paying

It's my last winter in the UK, so I won't be going into debt by not paying gas bills, but it baffles me how people believe every word politicians say. UK doesn't depend that much on Russian gas to put prices up that high. But you have to read something else than BBC to understand it.

i realise this isn’t quite the point, but I didn’t think they were allowed to cut certain groups of people off for non payment? The elderly, for example, and families with children - I read they weren’t allowed to cut people off between October and March.

im not saying you shouldn’t pay your bill, I just mean non payment doesn’t equal no fuel, for certain people.

Refusing to pay a utility bill is fucking stupid, and if you think that the companies that supply you with electricity are raking it in you are wrong. Why do you think so many of them have gone under recently?

What do you think a good profit margin would be?

As a PP said, the profits we're seeing from
Centrica and Shell and the like are from their upstream businesses, not their retail arms. With market prices going through the roof thanks to Russia but the costs of extraction not changing they're doing extremely well. But like all companies they're structured so that their retail business is a separate entity. If it was structured so that their wholesale business profits had to be used to subsidise their retail business, they'd simply shut down their retail business. It doesn't make nearly as much for them.

Windfall taxes makes a lot of sense here because it looks at those totally unearned profits that are down to luck and takes them to spread across the whole sector so that customers of standalone retail energy companies aren't disadvantaged.

No, I like having light, hot water and heating.

The one thing that annoys me the most is that the daily electricity standing charge has been increased by 20p a day to cover the failure by the bankrupt privatised companies to pay the levies to protect customers deposits. But we, as customers, need to take far more responsibility for our bills

1. Read your meters regularly, take a photo
2. Update your readings
3. Know your usage
4. Keep copies of your bills
5. Know your tariff
6. Understand how to calculate your dd
7. Know how much debt you owe to your energy company

What could the government do to help people?

1. Remove VAT, SC and green levy.

2 Tier the rates charged

@TheFormidableMrsC is paying for what she uses, but with winter coming and the rates increasing where is she going to get the extra?

As a pensioner I'm using £80 - £90 now wirh no debt but have been told my bills will be over £2,500 on a use of 6700kw gas and 2035kw electricity from October.

Remove VAT, SC and green levy.

Interested in these. VAT seems straightforward but doesn't SC cover the fixed costs of supplying electricity eg the electricity and gas networks among other things? Wouldn't removing that just push those costs onto the unit charge instead?

on green levy, are you including things like Warm Home Discount? What happens to the contracts that exist under the levy? Are you suggesting it just goes into general taxation, I can see how that would be fairer.

I did wonder about what would happen if we just paid what we are paying now and not the rest, or offer to pay either nothing or the amount we are used to. Will they really try to fit prepayment meters in millions of homes? That's a big task.

Some suppliers will go bust though as some of them are not producers, so would we really just be creating a monopoly instead and removing competition?

I think there will be a lot of civil disobedience with this and all of the other shit going on too. This has been predicted as occurring in the 2020's for a long time by those who study historical cycles, so very interesting.

What are your rights if you only partially pay the bill? Probably isn't any.

I have payg meters so can't really not pay, but even if I wasn't I wouldn't want my credit rating ruined and I wouldn't want the escalated bills and people braying on the door.
What's everyone going to do about internet and charging their devices when they're cut off for not paying? They won't even be able to communicate with each other unless they go and use other peoples electric.