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Post by andy on Jul 20, 2023 9:23:17 GMT
As a matter of interest, has there been any resolution of your billing problems? No. In fact if anything it's getting worse. I've been in tears every day this week over it. I can't remember where I'd got to in relaying what's happened but after the last letter, we phoned again and the person said they'd put a 90 day hold on things. I was sceptical because they'd already put a 30 day hold on, and we'd had another pair of letters saying that they were going to put it out to a debt collection agency. Sure enough, yesterday there was another hand-delivered letter saying that if we didn't pay up they'd be applying for a warrant etc etc. Michael has emailed and will be sending paper copies also, to Ovo, Ofgem, the Ombudsman, our MP, our MSP and I can't think who else right now. I'm terrified that someone is going to break into our house, seize our things, change the locks and install a prepayment meter...which will presumably still go to British Gas and not Ovo because we are not their customer! The only saving grace at the moment is that they clearly don't know which flat is involved. The letters are addressed to The Occupier, not us by name, and the flat they're addressed to is 1/A. That configuration doesn't exist. It's not us and it's not our neighbour. I am clinging to the hope that they can't barge in to both flats on the off chance that one is right. I mean, neither are right, but you know what I mean.  Sounds very stressful. Email the ceo? emailist.co.uk/ovo-energy-ceo-email-address/?amp=1 |
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Post by kate on Jul 20, 2023 9:54:54 GMT
Kath quote:
The only saving grace at the moment is that they clearly don't know which flat is involved. The letters are addressed to The Occupier, not us by name, and the flat they're addressed to is 1/A. That configuration doesn't exist. It's not us and it's not our neighbour. I am clinging to the hope that they can't barge in to both flats on the off chance that one is right. I mean, neither are right, but you know what I mean.
It sounds to me like a debt collection agency follow up - or a cock-up of a wrongly entered account by BG (or whoever) stuck in the system.
Do you know who had the flat before you? Perhaps it's to do with them.
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Post by Kath on Jul 20, 2023 11:45:53 GMT
It's a very long, convuluted story but what I *think* has happened is this.
We bought the flat in 2016. For reasons we don't understand the address that the flat was commonly referred to was incorrect. The previous owners had their electricity supplied by Ovo and gas was from British Gas. Ovo had one address for the flat and British Gas had it down as something slightly different. The Post Office had it down as something entirely different again. It took us two years to work out what the correct address was, and now if I buy something online and use the autofill to put my address in, the correct options for our flat and our neighbour's flat appear fairly consistently. Our gas and electricity bills were coming to the correct address. We did try moving all our energy to one supplier before but the gas meter and the electricity meter were, still for reasons unknown, registered to different addresses even though everyone agreed that the flat itself was just one address. We gave up trying to sort it because nobody seemed to have the ability to make them both appear as the same and at that point it didn't seem to matter all that much.
Come the cost of living crisis and the proposals around energy price caps, and Michael felt it was more important that we have one supplier and as Ovo's price increases at the time were looking the most horrendous, we decided to go to BG. Anyway, BG took about three or four weeks to work out what needed to happen and we switched supplier for our electricity. (Ovo issued us a refund on our overpayment and BG started taking our money by direct debit, payments to Ovo stopped...but the bills didn't and so on)
So I reckon there is this phantom address lurking deep within Ovo's databases that the electricity meter was once linked to. Still is linked to as far as Ovo are concerned. The reason I think someone somewhere hasn't unlinked it is because none of this is being resolved when we phone and give them our address: our actual address is linked to an account that has been terminated and which they acknowledge owes them nothing. They are putting a 30 and then 90 day hold on collections to our account but it's not having an effect because our account isn't linked to this non-existent address which they think does owe them money. As an aside, we have long felt that our electricity bill was really too high for the size of flat and number of people living in it, and I'm now wondering if we weren't being charged twice! But that's a whole other debate and frankly I don't care, I just want all this to stop!
Edit to add: we now have a case worker with the Ombusdman and with Energy Advice Scotland. Fingers crossed!
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