Kerry Burton is a Customer Advisor in energywatch’s Bournemouth office. She is also part of the transition team who will be staying on to help Consumer Focus over the transition period.
If you could pick one thing you’ve been involved with at energywatch, what would it be?
One thing? It’d have to be seasonal weighting. This was picked up by one of my consumers – Mr Bramwell, an amateur mathematician. The energy companies are allowed to charge energy at two prices – a lower and higher rate. They can only charge you for a set number of kilowatt/hours at the higher rate (4,572, to be precise) so what they normally do is spread it out through the year, with more in winter than summer. For example, they would charge maybe 2% in the middle of summer, going up to 12% in the winter.
In April 2007 NPower changed their computer system and moved to charge a flat rate of about 8% all year round. This would have been fine if they had kept this over twelve months, but when they changed their prices in the November they went back to the high winter percentages, so customers paid more over the summer, then even more through the winter.
We sent the case through to the Company Performance team and they passed it to Ofgem, but we’re still waiting as their investigations can take nine months.
As an office there have been some great ones though – like the time we got a gentleman free gas and electricity for life!
Free for life, how did you manage that?
He was an older gentleman, 73, and because of a billing error the energy company moved him onto a pre-payment meter (they thought he was over £4,000 in debt to them). The problem was that the meter was six or seven feet up – well out of his reach. It was his nephew that came to us as he had been telling his family he was fine, but in fact hadn’t had any gas or electricity for months. We threatened to go to the media with the story – the article was set to go, laid out and ready – but the energy company said that if we didn’t run the story he could have free electricity and gas for life. The nephew would phone us every so often after that and let us know how he was doing, which was really nice.
Do you think the energy companies have got better?
There were some we’d have a lot of problems with, but British Gas was the worst. We’d send them questions that they should answer in two weeks and it would take five for them to get back to us. There was one case where a man rented his house to tenants, who then bypassed the meter and ran up a £10,000 electricity bill growing drugs. The police raided them and carted the tenants off to jail. However, British Gas still tried to collect the bill from the landlord, even after the police said that he wasn’t liable for it. In the end Energywatch and the police had to go to court with British Gas to get it cleared. But they’ve got better, they’ve improved a lot in the last year.
Has the job changed at all?
It is a lot quieter these days. Andrea once took about 90 calls in one day, I think that was the record. There are also less screamers now, although that does mean you tend to notice them more when you do get them!
If you could give one bit of advice to Consumer Focus, what would it be?
One thing I have noticed is that consumers don’t help themselves. It’s the little things that are important – like spelling. A lot of people don’t spellcheck things before they send them and I think that bit of professionalism would really help. We always check everything before it goes out!
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|