I haven’t paid for any gas for 3 years. How to get out of it?

[Gastheif]

I know I have been unreasonable, looking for advice.
had a smart meter fitted 3 years ago since then and despite the company sending out meter readers all bills I have received for gas say £0 usage.
I want to get out of this situation, ideally without having to pay it back and before the price hikes mean that I may have a debt I can’t even afford, also before government help starts.
if I switch supplier, do you think this will fix itself?
WWYD?

Loving all the thieving comments.

We were on the phone to our energy company multiple times asking HOW the meter was registering zero gas use when we have a gas combi boiler for heating and water. And how it was clear that the house was being lived in as we were using electricity. They had no answers, said they would need to send someone round, but couldn't, "because Covid". Despite the fact the gas meter is outside.

We tried to raise it. They were not interested. Then when the meter started working again, they just accepted that we had not used gas for 18 months, and had suddenly started again. There is NO WAY of them knowing how much gas we used. Honestly, it's as if some people think we should be calculating it ourselves and sending Scottish Power a voluntary donation.

You don’t see how using gas without paying for it during a period of gas shortages affects everyone?

You wouldn't be arrested if you scanned an item through the till and it came up as zero, which is more similar to this. OP hasn't deliberately tricked them into giving her free gas, they've made a mistake which allowed it. Same as those people who take advantage of "glitches" while online shopping and get double discount or items for 90% off on Amazon. It's not stealing if they've made the error.

CuppaTeaAndSammich

Try being on the end of a phone each month for at least 2 hours trying to find out what your monthly bill is and being transferred to every other company in their group going round and round because apparently you aren’t with that company.

Now that is theft of my time. They don’t give a stuff that they keep you hanging on the phone for 40 or 50 minutes and when you do get through and explain why you are calling I swear if they think it is too complicated they just hang up.
They stopped billing from February - June. (they turned my meter off). I said if I wasn’t apparently with any company in their group then I would wait for a physical bill.

Personally I wish I hadn’t bothered getting in touch with them in the first place. I think I could have gone all year without paying anything and I wouldn’t call it theft.

I would call it saving me a lot of time and stress

There is a difference between an energy producer and an energy retailer.

The producers are the ones making the profits, retailers are barely making anything compared to the price per barrel.
And the ones that are making a profit are doing so from their upstream services or from taking on customers through the smaller companies that went bust last year.

Theres a reason for the price cap, it’s to protect the business and the consumer, price cap too low risks more companies going bust.

Obviously I agree it’s horrendous the situation with energy, but just assuming these energy companies are taking us for a ride just isn’t true, there’s so much more to it than what you read on the front page.

FYI my business energy has increased from 8k to 32k this year.

OP saying that the energy companies taking these losses from their profits is ludicrous, it’ll probably come back to us small business owners who don’t have the luxury of the price cap, and when I have to shut up shop then all my employees and their families are affected.
They go on to claim benefits and everyone else gets a tax increase.

Its not all so black and white, so much more going on.

And yes, I’ll stand by what I said OP is morally wrong, they haven’t even bothered to notify their supplier.
I wouldn’t say the same if they had informed them but their supplier failed to do anything.

Your choice to give yourself a flippant name to post but that changes nothing.

I've posted in good faith on the assumption that what you've said is true so, that poster owes you an apology. You likely won't get it though, not from that sort.

Pay your good luck forward. Let the energy company sort itself out.

My folks haven’t paid a gas bill for over 10 years. The company they were with just stopped sending bills. My dad has tried for years to get them to send one, get a visit from a technician, or find out if they were accidentally swapped to another supplier, but no one is interested! The old company say they have no record of any money being owed as they are not the supplier.
they asked for who the supplier was and got told the original company.
my dad kept a record of phone calls and who he spoke to, as well as copies of letters thet were sent recorded delivery (to which he had zero response). In the end he gave up trying.
they have savings so can pay the 12 months if ever anyone ever decides that they want paying!

My electricity supplier doesn't believe me that my meter or supply exists. They also don't believe the house builder, original owner, another electricity company, whoever they sent to force open the box and install a digital meter when I was at work one day or anybody else and I did try on multiple occasions both by phone and email to get it set up, but was told it's impossible. No neighbours are being charged for my use, either. They also - because I was already a dual fuel customer when I moved - closed that tariff to me and moved me onto a gas only one. Means my gas costs slightly more than it would have done on dual fuel and I wasn't able to take up the Warm Homes Grant when eligible, but I'm still up on the deal with free electricity.

In the meantime, the amount they refuse to charge me for and cannot recover by law continues to increase.

I'm sure they'll notice eventually. And when they do, I'll be paying the equivalent of the lowest possible dual fuel tariff on the market at the time, as I'd have definitely used whoever that was.

Oh, well. I've tried but they don't want to know.

I got 2 years of free WiFi and phone line from SKY when I first moved in to my current property. I contacted them a number of times and received no bill so left it then after 2 years contacted them again and they started my bill from that date. Didn't have to pay back anything. I shouldn't have contacted them atall 🤣

They came out to fit the phone line and sky box when I moved in so it's not like they didn't know.

Everyone on this thread that hasn’t paid any bills, at least made the effort to contact their supplier and let them know of the error.

OP has made no conscious effort to tell their supplier, that is what’s immoral.

It’d be totally different if OP sent them an email 2 years ago but supplier failed to act on it.

The problem you have is that you can’t prove the readings. So all of your usage could have been in the past 12 months..

This happened to my husband and I. When we were young, we lived in a tenement and were electricity only. When we tried to take over the billing the supplier couldn't find us. We called numerous times and eventually they sent an engineer out.

He said the number registered on the meter was registered to a flat in our building that didn't exist (say we were 4/2, the meter was assigned to 4/b) and it was likely that the last tenant had never had to pay either.

He called it a 'ghost meter' and said his advise was to never say another word about it.

We lived there for three years, stoating about bare naked with the sweat lashing off us.

We only have our memories to keep us warm now!

there is a rolling that unless the company alert you to the fact you're in debt with them - they can not go back for more than 12 months to collect a debt.

I had economy 7 sorted on my electric meter in 1990 and having only moved into the house 2 months previously - not had any bills as bills were quarterly and paper through the post.

I then kept getting my electric bill and it was constant;y £11, thought nothing of it for a few months. Then I checked the meter one day and then checked it a week later - the meter hadn't moved... I looked at the paper bill and the £11 was for standing charge for 3 months and the meter reading on all the bills was the same.

I alerted the electric board but also had a friend who was an electrician with me when they arrived.
When they switched it to economy 7 they had turned off the meter.

I had a long conversation with the electric board and they wanted me to pay, I suggested as id been honest and altered to them of the fact.(I could have let the situation continue for another year or more) something was wrong I would pay for every unit they could prove I had used - as they had no estimate of how much I usually used.

That was the end of the matter

OP is letting them access the meter and pays by direct debit.
Tbh if it was my gas meter and supply, I would contact them because obviously something isn't working and I wouldn't risk that whatever is broken or turned off wouldn't have the potential to negatively impact gas supply at some point. Purely from a paranoid health and safety pov, I'd be chasing it up.

We couldn't get anyone to bill us for gas in our old house but we spent over a year calling companies; contacting the ombudsman; etc. Our meter was registering our usage - we just couldn't get anyone to bill us for it.

OP has made no conscious effort to tell their supplier, that is what’s immoral.

Bollocks. Morality is as madey uppy as money and sky fairies.

I think I’d just keep my head down OP.

Neither OP nor myself can be a thief - as we are telling them
a) what is happening
b) complaining about it
c) warning them that this will happen in the future

OP is letting them access the meter and pays by direct debit.

But OP hasn’t informed supplier they are using any gas, that’s the difference.

Good on you OP!!!
I would suggest switching suppliers. They will transfer contracts and hopefully they will just ask for meter readings and leave it at that 🤞🏼🤞🏼

@MumofSpud op has done none of those things.
OP hasn’t contacted the supplier at all

Hi OP,

This current energy pricing crisis, and now your post, are both reminding me of the job I used to do when I worked for British Gas, which was to deal with the excessively high bills and the zero bills.

Not sure what supplier you are with, and procedures will have changed since my day, but I'd say both you and the supplier are equally at fault here. They should have a procedure to deal with zero bills, and you, having noticed your £0 charges, should have reported this straight away.

I understand how some PPs have compared it to scanning an item and it not charging a price, but what you are doing is the equivalent of going back to the shop and "buying" an endless supply of the free item before anyone notices, i.e. you know it's an error and are exploiting it for your own gain.

I doubt if meter readers are trained to inspect meters any longer, and smart meters will rarely be seen by a reader anyway, so the company should be picking up on this at the billing stage.

You, however, know the cost of gas and if you are using gas, you know you should be paying a bill so you should keep yourself in the right by reporting it. If they fail to act, that is not your problem - you have at least (and at last!) done the right thing and brought it to their attention.

Re. the backdated charges, IIRC, they cannot force you to pay anything at all, but given how long you have left this, refusal to pay a penny may be interpreted as you wilfully avoiding payment all along. The usual outcome when I did this was to negotiate an estimated usage and amount with the customer, and agree a one-off tailored payment plan if required.

And your non-indicating meter should be replaced with a new one, unless it's just not been set properly in the first place.

You wouldn't have got this far with it in my day!😄

How do you "inform them you are using gas"? They are coming to read her meter, they are obviously aware there is a gas supply into the property.

And as those of us have been through this, you just try getting sense out of an energy company call centre. Impossible to get to speak to the same person twice, and when it's a question which is a wee bit out of the ordinary they just don't want to know.

Yeah sorry @MumofSpud . I haven’t. In your situation I wouldn’t worry one little bit. That really isn’t your fault at all.

I am surprised there’s so many of us. DH has gone to faff with the meter, see if he can get any reading or just switch it on or something.

If the meter reads zero every month I’d say nothing and krank the heating up all winter 😀 whooo hooo 🥳🥵