To not want a prepayment meter

[Cocoloco889]

Name change due to shame. I'm just looking for advice please.
I have a back injury from in a car crash a few years ago and received compensation and lived off that for a while. However I'm now on universal credit and after rent I have £500 left. I can afford food and a few other minor bills and that is all.
I'm in £2k debt to scottish power and they have written to me saying they are applying to install a prepayment meter.
I have no idea what I'm going to do, I won't be able to top it up. I'm going out of my mind with worry, I can barely buy food this week. I've got £9 to last me until the 30th and its going to be worse with gas and electric to pay for too. I realise there are a lot of people worse off than me and I've tried everything I can to find work, but with my back injury its proving quite difficult

Do Scottish Power have a social tariff?

Where I work we use sign video and the interpreters work from home

https://signvideo.co.uk/careers/vrs-interpreters/

I’m disabled and I haven’t had heating in my house for over 20 years. Some people just don’t have that luxury.

@WingsofRain it's not a competition who has it worse.
There is help out there if you need towards gas & electric.

Not any more😞

You can set it up so energy debt is taken straight out of benefits at a low rate. I did that for my DB who has schizophrenia and was facing being moved back onto a prepayment which would have been a complete disaster - he would just have no electric and everything in the fridge would go mouldy regularly. He couldn't eat and it was so detrimental, I felt so enraged like it was a human rights issue. The scheme isn't well advertised but the energy company will know it. Its called the Fuel Direct Scheme.

Wow. So Scottish power are just going to give you free energy?

That’s interesting. So rather than set up a prepayment meter to take what’s owed, they take it at source?

Who is your supplier@Wwyd2025 ?

Do you have the grandkids on your UC claim?

Great update, OP. Glad it worked out for you! And I hope UC are aware you’re the one taking care of the children and pay accordingly.

Yes you need to do it when you are in arrears before the debt is sold. You can also arrange to have new bills added to it. It's a way of avoiding going onto a prepayment meter with all the pitfalls of that.

However important to check as it used to be the case that prepayment was more expensive, I am not sure if that is still the case since COL crisis.

Yeah, I know the prepayment meters are expensive, I have a friend who had to have one. I can’t remember how much they take off everything he puts it but they will get every penny owed. He’s not entitled to any benefits though, single man working, so no help for him. He’s also stuck with the energy supplier until it’s paid off too which is understandable. Hence my posts to the OP.

The energy companies are crazy, when I moved and joined British Gas i was put on a very low amount direct debit which I even said to the agent was too low.

They said I have a smart meter and they’d update accordingly monthly if they needed to raise it but they were adamant the amount was fine. The direct debit stayed like that for some time then After 9 months in March 2023 they told me I’d accrued a huge debit as apparently I hadn’t been paying enough! They wanted to raise direct debit by 6 times or so to £370 or something and claimed it was the only way.

I had to be really firm with them and get it down to £160 because there was no real reason for me to go into debt with all my other bills just because BG had set the direct debit too low.

I spoke to multiple people at BG during one week to sort this out it was absolute chaos and one guy randomly said we could talk about installing a prepayment meter 🙄 I shut that down quickly!

Over a year later I’ve managed to clear most of the debt through paying the £160 which is just £40 more than my monthly usage.

At the time I also ended up getting an apology and £60 taken off my debt because I was so assertive. Not everyone is like that though.

But the whole thing just made me think how vulnerable or even just more mild mannered people can so easily get screwed over or massively financially inconvenienced by these companies.

No they don't but we don't want more to suffer that because we know that will increase the number who needlessly die

@Cocoloco889 Someone else from Scottish Power emailed me this morning and arranged to call me. It was from the welfare department. They asked me what I could realistically afford to pay bearing in mind my monthly usage is £158. I said I could pay £50 and she said that because my monthly usage was way above my affordability and I have vulnerabilities, (I'm diabetic and have a back injury,) they weren't going to ask me to pay and I won't be cut off.

So Scottish Power have canceled the warrant for the prepayment meter being installed and have said I can't afford to pay so they aren't going to chase me for payment,

So..... Scottish Power have now told you, that not only are they not going to install a prepayment meter, but they are also writing off your £2000 debt?

And this is purely because you are diabetic and have had a back injury?

Wow. Just wow.

No they have put the debt on hold. The amount will still build up and the OP will still have to pay it unless there is a payment from a hardship fund.

It's a practical step, they could take the OP to court and the court would look at the OPs means and ask her to pay something like £1 a month. Or an attachment of earnings which means she would pay £0 as she is not in work.

This costs the energy company ££

Then if she defaulted they could sell the debt and only get about 25% of the money owed.

As the OP is disabled and has two young children in the house a bailiff cannot enter.

So they have put the debt on a shelf in the hope that the OP will be back in work and then start paying.