May Case Study
Jo is a PhD student who moved to Britain to complete her doctorate, and lives with her husband and young child while he works part-time to support the family. When she signed up with an energy supplier, she trusted them to bill her accurately - but for years her supplier estimated her electricity usage at just £20 a month, an underestimate of what she was really using. When Jo noticed that her bills were estimated and submitted meter readings, she was hit with a shock bill for almost £3,000 - a debt that had built up completely without her knowledge.
Soon after, Jo moved house. Despite no longer living at her old property, her supplier kept adding charges to that account, and a complaint she had already raised with them had gone nowhere. Overwhelmed and unsure where to turn, she came to Act on Energy for help.
We sent outreach worker Michael to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong. He quickly found that Jo's supplier had never stopped billing her old address after she'd moved out, wrongly adding over £400 to her account on top of the near-£3,000 debt already hanging over her.
Michael got straight to work. He visited Jo at her home multiple times and successfully pushed Jo's supplier to wipe the £400 in mistaken charges from her old property completely.
He then turned to the bigger issue - the £3,000 debt. Under the energy industry's back-billing rules, suppliers can only charge customers for energy used more than 12 months ago if the delay on charging wasn't the customer's fault. Since Jo's debt had built up because her supplier failed to take accurate readings and underestimated her usage for years, Michael argued that a large chunk of the bill fell outside this legal window and should never have been charged. He backed this up by threatening to take Jo's case to the Energy Ombudsman.
Faced with this, Jo's supplier backed down entirely - wiping the full £3,000 debt and paying her £500 in compensation for the trouble caused. Jo can now put the stress behind her and focus on what matters: finishing her PhD.
