Residents in our new housing development are being billed for each other\u2019s energy after the meters were mixed up.<\/p>\n
I realised British Gas was sending bills for my energy to the developer of the estate instead of to me. I informed British Gas of my details when I moved in seven months ago.<\/p>\n
When I finally persuaded it to put the account in my name, and tried to set up a direct debit, it sent my bank details to the developer and continued to bill it. It then began billing me for a meter with a different reference number to my own.<\/p>\n
It turned out that my newly installed meter \u2013 and those of my neighbours \u2013 had been registered to different addresses.<\/p>\n
British Gas offered me compensation for the data breach involving my bank details but closed my complaint about the meter mix-up.<\/p>\n
I informed it that I was cancelling my direct debit as I was not prepared to pay someone else\u2019s bill. British Gas merely informed me that this would result in a higher tariff.<\/p>\n
CG, Shropshire<\/p>\n
Your estate is still under construction, and you reckon all of the half-dozen properties that are now occupied are affected.<\/p>\n
Given that the charges are estimates, and that the properties range from five-bedroom houses to two-bedroom social housing, some residents may be being significantly overcharged.<\/p>\n
British Gas confirmed to me that it has so far identified that the meters of all of the homes it supplies have been mixed up.<\/p>\n
\u201cEnergy meters for new-build properties can sometimes be registered incorrectly following construction when a plot number is assigned to the wrong address,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
It told me that your meter has now been correctly assigned, and it is correcting your neighbours\u2019 meters on the national database.<\/p>\n
When it did get in touch with you, it was to say that your tariff had increased by a total of 19% because you had cancelled your direct debit and forfeited the associated discount. You had cancelled it so that you wouldn\u2019t be paying for someone else\u2019s energy.<\/p>\n
You are reluctant to reinstate it until you have been issued with a revised bill showing your household\u2019s actual consumption. That\u2019s lost on British Gas, too.<\/p>\n
Instead, it says your payment for energy that may, or may not, have been used by you, is overdue and will incur a \u00a313 surcharge if you don\u2019t stump up pronto.<\/p>\n
Three months after I first contacted it, you are still getting contradictory bills that may, or may not, be yours, and you are still waiting for the promised compensation.<\/p>\n
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com<\/a> or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Residents in our new housing development are being billed for each other\u2019s energy after the meters were mixed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-703052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}