British Gas prepayment meter farce

[DieselDoctor]

British Gas broke into my house while I was at work, giving my disabled wife a scare in the process. Because I hadn't paid my last bill they fitted a prepayment meter, and told the wife a top-up card with which we can add credit to the meter would come within 3 days.

 

The card never came, so after a week I phoned to tell them. They apologised, sent a man within four hours to add £5 of emergency credit to the meter, and said they were sending out another card. It obviously didn't occur to them that they could have got said man to bring a card with him.

 

The second card never came, and the £5 credit went in two days, so the meter cut the gas off. In the meantime I'd looked up info on the Net and read that I could go to any PayPoint store, get a meter card from them, bring it home, stick it in the meter to initialise it (presumably with a meter identity code, though nobody actually tells you that), take it back to the PayPoint store and have them put some credit on it.

 

When I returned the card to the store they found they couldn't credit it and would get the message "Invalid Card". So they gave me another new card in case the first was faulty, which I took back and initialised, returning to the store for credit. Their PayPoint machine again said "Invalid Card".

 

I phoned BG, told them all about it, and they sent out another bloke to put a walloping great £5 of credit on it. They listened to what I was saying, made me cycle through menus on the meter and read off some spurious code, then proudly announced it wasn't working because this meter doesn't take the usual BG card, but requires a modified version known as an RTI card - available from them (yes, they were sending out yet another new card that would never reach me) or also available from PayPoint "superagents". What a load of old rubbish.

 

I found myself a superagent, got an RTI card off them, quoted an identification number given to me by BG over the last phone chat and based on the code I'd read to them off the meter, and they loaded this code successfully onto my shiny new RTI card. Trouble is that when they then tried to load £20 of credit onto the card, the PayPoint machine choked in horror at the attempt, saying this card was just a load of invalid nonsense. Marvellous.

 

So I phoned BG yet again, gave them the entire spiel, read more numbers off meter menus, waited forever, then was told they had the solution - that this was a special type of meter requiring a different type of card again, this time called a "PCV" card or something similar; unfortunately the man I spoke too was very foreign, and although I made him repeat the "PCV" three times, each time it sounded completely different, so all I know is that it's a combination of three consonants. I think.

 

Anyway, even PayPoint superagents wouldn't have one of these beauties, so the BG man was seeing to it that one would be sent to me first-class so I'd have it in two days. I pointed out to him that it's unlikely I'd receive anything, since the previous two mailings of cards to me never materialised. (The real mystery here is why, when they send someone to my door, it's successful - so they clearly have the right address - but when they send prepayment cars to me in the post, it's as effective as if they didn't send me anything at all). But he was confident I'd get it, and guess what? I didn't. That was five days ago. Still no gas.

 

In fact we've now had no gas at all for 90% of the last four weeks, and tomorrow the weather forecast says will be no warmer than 3 deg. C. My wife is disabled, we have a four-year-old living with us (and two other kids), and our shiny new hi-tech gas meter is little more than a decorative fixture embellishing some dirty old pipes - one that I never asked for and do not want.

 

I should also mention that every time I phone these people I'm on the telephone for about 45 minutes - AT A COST OF 14p PER MINUTE - I am paying through the nose for the crassness and incompetence of a stinking rich utility company that seems not to give one jot about the fact that it has shafted me and my family big-time. If I didn't owe these peasants so much money I would switch pronto to another gas supplier.

 

So that's where we're at: new meter, no gas, no cards I've ever seen will work in it, BG is incapable of working out what's wrong or sending me anything in the post - except bills, which somehow do successfully make it to my house. Funny that. I'm not expecting anyone on this forum to have any useful suggestions for me, but I do want people to understand the depths of uselessness which this fine utility company is plumbing.

 

There is only consolation for me in all this: that all the while the meter is inoperative BG is receiving no money from me and certainly not getting any of the outstanding debt paid. When they choose to take an interest and fix the problem rather than making empty pledges and mouthing confused platitudes, I will consider paying them.

 

Never again, British Gas. Never again. I will be paying the French, the Germans or even the Spanish for my gas in the future.

 

 

DieselDoctor

 

 

 

STOP PRESS: Wow! I've just got off the phone to my wife, who tells me she's been badgering BG all afternoon (at a personal cost of 14p a minute, don't forget), and she's been told that we didn't receive the three meter cards because the despatch system has been rejecting the possibility on our account. But nobody told us that. Funnily enough, she then spoke to another operative, because the first one she was speaking to failed to phone her back, who gives a different version of that story: that since September the twenty-somethingth the card-despatching system has not been working and has been refusing to send anybody cards! Today it's the 25th of October - that's how long we've been cold. So either the previous people I spoke to and who came to my door weren't told this by their employers, or they were deliberately avoiding acknowledging the fact, and lying through their teeth to us every time they said a new card in the post would be the solution.

 

Anyway, they are "sending a new card by manual despatch", and promise it will be with us by Monday (today is Thursday). Don't be so darned stupid, because no, it won't. But despatch systems apart.... the new cards from PayPoint stores haven't been working anyway, and my internet trawl reveals NO mention of any 'new-type' "PCV" or "BBC" or "123" card being in use. So, another damn lie, I suspect.

Edited October 25, 2012 by DieselDoctor

[i hate bailiffs]

British gas customer service as bad as ever

 

BG got a court order to force entry?

if you can clear the arrears you can change suppler and have a normal meter fitted that would work out cheaper per unit

 

Hope you are making a formal complaint to BG in writing with either proof of posting or recorded delivery

[DieselDoctor]

Yes, I will be doing so, but I'm waiting for the saga to come to a close so I can document the whole sorry comedy of errors in detail and ask them to reimburse me for the tens of pounds I've spent on chasing their ignorant staff around on the phone for several days running. Honestly, they've got big balls to charge people 14p per minute to inform them of their own incompetence. It's almost as brass-necked as the UK government levying VAT on the tax they charge us on each litre of petrol, which is about 65% of the price; I mean, how the hell do you get away with charging duty on duty? It's a flaming outrage.

 

Yes, they got a warrant to get into our house, but fortunately didn't have to damage anything as they used the old strap-through-the-letterbox-and-yank-down-the-handle trick, being a bunch of time-served criminals with inimitable skills in nest-feathering and pocket-lining.

 

The reason we didn't know they were coming was that we were in such hock to everyone, with severely reduced income and no hope of paying outstanding bills, that we'd given up reading all the angry letters in the certain knowledge that there was nowt we could do about any of them. But no, I don't recommend anyone try the same at home, because it only ultimately bites you in the backside.

 

 

DieselDoctor

[Conniff]

Drop a line to the boss - [email protected]

 

Don't be so damned nice as you have in your post, just come straight to the point that you have been lied to and fobbed off for over a month and still havent' got a gas card and don't forget to rub it in that you have a disabled wife.

 

Ask that they refund all the phone charges.

 

and don't forget to make a report to ofgem, that's a must.

[DieselDoctor]

Thank you, Conniff, for your advice - that's the kind of spur I need. I will do these things.

 

Incidentally, one small update concerning yesterday's phone convo between the Missus and BG: apparently they again said they'd send a bloke round within four hours to put more emergency credit on the meter. This time, though, nobody came.

 

Today it's cold, just as the meteorologists said it would be, so I'll be getting our old Calor bottled gas heater down from the attic so that I can poison the entire family with carbon monoxide and further rot the window frames with condensation.

 

PS: Incidentally, matey, as you're a site tech...

“CAG toolbar could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 15.0.1.”

Can you confirm that this is definitely the case?

Edited October 26, 2012 by DieselDoctor

[Stopthethieves]

British gas customer service as bad as ever

 

BG got a court order to force entry?

if you can clear the arrears you can change suppler and have a normal meter fitted that would work out cheaper per unit

 

Hope you are making a formal complaint to BG in writing with either proof of posting or recorded delivery

 

Don't forgot though that BG report the conduct of your account to the CRA's and so are likely to have trashed your credit file and the likely hope of having a credit meter reinstalled in the near future. This may depend however on when you opened an account with them.

[DieselDoctor]

My credit rating has been in the toilet for some years now, so I'm certainly not concerned that BG will drop me in it. To be honest, I've found that life is much easier if you accept that the only way you can ever have anything is if to save for it and pay up front, in full. Consequently I have nothing, but at least I'm not making things much worse for myself, as used to be the case when I did have access to credit.

 

Anyway, the prepayment farce: the latest is that the missus again phoned them, they again said they were sending a man to add more emergency credit, and they didn't. But what's particularly gobsmacking is that the person she spoke to said she could see on our file that the perpayment cards weren't ever despatched as the system "rejected" the possibility. Yet nobody else we've spoken to there could see that?

 

It gets better: another day, another new customer service operative, and this one tells the wife that it's no surprise we never received any cards, as their despatch system has been screwed since September, and NOBODY has been getting cards for about a month. In fact, an emergency-credit man turned up the next day to put a generous £10 of gas on, and he pretty well confirmed this by admitting that all he's been doing 8 hours a day for weeks is driving around and putting emergency credit on everyone's meters. It's pathetic.

 

In fact it flabbers my gast.

 

Anyway, this woman says she will send us the card we need, but will circumvent the non-functioning despatch system to ensure we receive it, by post, on Monday. Yeah right.

 

But to my utter disbelief an RTI card does appear on our mat on Monday morning, and it initialises correctly in the meter, AND, finally, accepts credit at a PayPoint store. We now have gas.

 

If anybody can make any sense of this whole farrago, they're clearly far more intelligent than me, because I'm bemused and totally drained.

[Dilettante]

To be fair to utility companies,there is usually a very long preamble before they move to force fit meters under warrant in this manner. The preamble can be 6 months or more of letters,visits,etc.

 

Did the OP have this pre-amble and if so,did they respond/make arrangements to pay?

[stu007]

Hi

 

Tut Tut Tut British Gas obtained a warranty of entery to a property that had a vulnerable customer (disabled wife) bet the judge that granted warrant was unaware of this and never told by BG.

 

BG Broke into the property with vulnerable customer present with no knowledge of warrant thus placing that vulnerable person in fear of their life as to who was forcing entry with absolutely no duty of care by the BG operative breaching the equality act in the process.

 

Did you know that BG had obtained this warrant and the date they would act on it?

 

Also are you registered with BG Priority Service? If not get registered.

 

Have you looked at BG website at the Warm Home Discount to see if your entilted?

 

These PDF may be of help: (in the Energy Retailers Association on look at Section 6)

Edited November 4, 2012 by stu007

[2Grumpy]

Have you tried contacting trading standards & energywatch (or the current names for these organisations) They can make BG act very quickly

[Dilettante]

I dont believe energywatch exists any more...

[Surfer01]

I dont believe energywatch exists any more...

 

Correct it has been replaced by another organisation. Same faces, different name! See http://www.ombudsman-services.org/energy.html