Can anyone advise? Water company charging £700 on a £100 unpaid bill and saying they will cut us off tomorrow if we don't pay

[Thisweeksdrama]

Quick summary: commercial water company Castle Water supplies a small office we own (we use top floor, a tenant rents floor below). The invoices have been going to an old email address that I no longer have access to - I totally forgot they were going there and just failed to notice that bills hadn't been arriving. I must have ticked an 'email only invoice' box years ago and forgotten.

Anyway, the original bill was just over £100 but in the past few months they've added £700 in unpaid bill fees including almost £500 for a referral to a debt collection agency.

I only found out about this at work today when I got a call from said debt collection company who have said our water will get cut off if we don't pay the £800 bill tomorrow.

I know this is really sloppy of me but I am juggling a huge amount at the moment including recent loss of close family member and I just dropped the ball. We didn't get a single phone from Castle Water chasing up the bill - apparently they don't do that. We honestly weren't trying to dodge paying the bill and I could easily have paid it if I'd realised.

I've tried calling Castle Water to explain but they won't budge on it and are saying we can put in a complaint but we won't get anywhere and they will cut us off regardless unless we pay the full amount tomorrow.

I'm horribly stressed at the moment and this is making me feel physically ill.

Does anyone have any advice / know of anything we can do?

Bumping (and now wondering if maybe I should have posted in chat or somewhere with more traffic!)

Is there anything residential that the supply supplies? Are the tenants commercial ones or resi?They can’t cut it off if so.

no, the tenants are commercial too

Will they negotiate a repayment plan?

I didn't ask that (and they'll be closed now) but I got the impression they wouldn't.

I know it's a mistake on my part but it was a genuine error and the penalty seems so disproportionate - seven times the original bill

Contact the National Debt line. You can also try the CABx consumer helpline.

Thank you - I'll try them

It sounds like you’ve had a really rough few months, and I can completely understand how this has happened.

But, hard as it is, I think that you just need to pay the invoice and do it first thing this morning. It will go up if you get cut off because you’ll need to pay to get reconnected, and it will do damage to your business and to the confidence of the people renting from you if the water gets cut off.

It’s a huge amount of money to pay for a £100 invoice but I think that you need to be kind to yourself, pay it, and move on.

I would ask about a payment plan first thing. Can you pay if needed? As it’s a business you don’t have many protections.

Can you contact the ombudsman. For them to only try and contact you by email seems odd and not very proactive on their part - if the situation is escalating to debt collection they should have tried to phone/send letters - contact debt charity and explain situation regarding lack of contact, see if they can negotiate a lower balance and repayment plan but do try the ombudsman too.

Thank you everyone for your kindness and for taking the time to post. I have meetings all morning and today is the deadline so I will try the debt people and ombudsman at lunchtime and if not I'll have to suck it up and pay. We can pay the bill but the business doesn't have that money to spare - it's winding down. Was set up in 2019 and became a Covid casualty, and just been trying to keep it going long enough to pay back a covid bounce back loan. Just can't believe it's got to this stage as @Nagginthenag says, it seems so weird that they wouldn't call before contacting debt collection.

Citizens Advice consumer helpline: 08082231133

https://nationaldebtline.org/

https://www.gov.uk/late-commercial-payments-interest-debt-recovery/charging-interest-commercial-debt

“The interest you can charge if another business is late paying for goods or a service is ‘statutory interest’ - this is 8% plus the Bank of England base rate for business to business transactions. You cannot claim statutory interest if there’s a different rate of interest in a contract.”

Check your business water contract but I think you will have to accept responsibility here

You could also try posting in legal, there are some very good posters that may be able to advise you/