Service blunders pile on the agony for UK customers as energy bills rocket

theguardian.com:

Extortionate energy bills that land on the nation’s doormats this spring may not be solely due to soaring gas prices. Customer service blunders have left some households facing erroneous demands for hundreds of pounds and threats of bailiffs if they contest them.

Last year, 40% of energy complaints made to Citizens Advice concerned inaccurate billing, it says. According to the charity, companies are “failing in their most basic obligation to customers”.

Inadequate IT systems, faulty meters and mismatched accounts are to blame for thousands of inaccurate charges at a time when gas and electricity bills are set to rise by 51%, following the price cap review in April.

One Cash reader, Ali Shearer, was stunned to open a final demand of £1,000 from Scottish Power. He’d received no previous bills from the company because he had never been a Scottish Power customer.

“It started with a man arriving at the door to read the meter,” he says. “He told me he had the wrong meter number for the house and that he’d deal with it. Unbeknownst to me, he was from Scottish Power, not SSE, which has supplied my energy since 2010.”

Shearer’s numerous attempts to convince Scottish Power that he was not a customer were ineffective. Over the next nine months, he received letters and a visit from two debt collection companies. Last month two bills for £1,700 and £1,729 arrived in the same week, addressed to “Owner/Occupier”. Only after the Observer contacted Scottish Power did the firm discover that Shearer was being billed for the electricity consumption of a nearby water pumping station.

“We should not have pursued him for this debt. We have apologised and agreed a gesture of goodwill,” it says.

Scottish Power customers Douglas and Karen Wilson were