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by THE SAGA BEGINS
Foreword.....
Many of you will already know of "the corporate bully syndrome" as you will have seen it both here and on the old "ROB" and you will recognise it when you have see it in past newspaper and TV articles. The TV programme, Watchdog, has shown this phenomenon on many occasions.
One of the very special qualities of this syndrome is that when the big bully corporate entities are faced with exposure on national TV or in national newspapers they always cave in and usually finally admit that they were wrong and that they apologise for any mistakes that have been made. THIS is in fact a very common occurence !
NOW...my story in some detail.....
As a very responsible and careful consumer I have always paid my bills via variable direct debit as this is the most hassle-free way to do it and this method usually comes with discounts attached to such payments.
I have been with the Hydro Electric Board, ( better known as Southern and Scottish Energy group ), for close on twenty years and up until this point I can say that I have been very happy with the way they have serviced my energy needs. In fact I was so pleased with the way that they did things that when I moved back into the central belt in August 2007 I asked them to supply me with gas as well as electricity. This "dual-fuel" deal seemed to be a good way to save money.
Everything went well until I realised last year that I was missing a bill and phoned to get one. At the same time it was admitted by the office that I had phoned that they had "accidentally omitted" to actually read my meter at the six months point. This meant that I had not had a proper reading done on my electricity meter for close on a year. My call seemed to generate a lot of activity at the billing department of The Hydro Board and soon I had received a number of overlapping bills on different tariffs and rates and discounts which were very confusing. I received one bill that stated that I was £431.23 in debit for one period and that my monthly payments would have to rise from £60.00 per month to £101.00 per month. I was rather surprised at this but as I - at this point - trusted them to get it right, I agreed to this change of direct debit payments.
My home and it's general energy needs....
Before I go on I feel that I have to tell you all about my little home and what my energy-usage normally is:
As my wife and I - and nobody else - now live in a modern two-bedroomed semi-detached villa with double-glazing and high-quality insulation throughout I have found that this home is a very warm, cosy and easy to heat building. As all of our central heating and water heating and half of our cooking is done using gas I do not expect my electricity bills to be anything surprising. In fact I removed all of the tungsten filament bulbs in the house and replaced them wih low voltage ones as soon as I arrived at this address. The only lights that are liable to use a lot of power are the three flood-lights around my property and as they are serious energy-users I have adjusted them back to only one minute of "on" time every time a person walks near during darkness hours. ( This seldom actually happens ).
With all of this in mind I do not expect that my home will use any more electricity than any other average home of the same type might use. After a recent enquiry to customer services at The Hydro Board about why I had not had a recent bill I was sent one based on a reading I took myself. When it arrived it showed that after eight monthly payments of £101.00 totalling £808.00 I was only £15.00 in credit. ( bells started to ring that something was wrong ! )
I checked back all of the payments that were - according to my bank statements - made by me over the past year and found that adding up the eight payments at £101.00 per month plus four payments at £60.00, plus a £200.00 amount that I had transferred over from my in-credit gas account I had actually paid to them £1,248 over a twelve month period between August 2008 and August 2009.
I e-mailed the payment office and asked if there had been a mistake ! This triggered a flurry of e-mails where their so-called billing experts added up all of the numerous ESTIMATED accounts that I had been given over this period and they then told me that the £15.00 credit was right and that I HAD in fact used that much electricity even although these calculations were mostly based on my estimated usage of electricity. When I suggested that maybe they had added two of these estimations together instead of counting them and the units-used all serially they refused to admit to this or to any other mistake. I have since been given the runaround between higher and higher members of that billing office and none of them seem to be able to find out where the miscalculation has been made. In fact it is beginning to look like they are all just repeating the same mistakes over and over again in a habitual fashion with - it would seem - no desire to actually find out what has gone wrong.
How many times in the past - as I said above - have we seen this syndrome occur and how many times has it taken the influence of some powerful entity like the TV programme "Watchdog" or some consumer column of a national newspaper to make corporate bullies like these relent and finally admit they are wrong ?
I have already stated that if they do not admit to having made a billing mistake here I will move to another dual-fuel supplier and one thing will become very self evident; these particular corporate bully-boy tactics against a couple of pensioners will not come out of the wash looking very clean.
Yes, I do plan to write to my national Scottish newspaper consumer column, "The judge" and I do also plan to write a letter to the TV consumer programme "Watchdog".
Watch this space...........
