British Gas compensates customers for meter confusion

Britain’s biggest energy supplier has agreed to pay out £1.73 million after failing to inform hundreds of thousands of customers that it had changed their top-up payment provider.

British Gas will avoid a fine from the energy regulator as it compensates those affected. Ofgem said the bungled switch, which took place last winter, hit vulnerable customers particularly hard.

About 270,000 pre-payment customers were not told when the company swapped its top-up provider from Paypoint to Payzone on January 1. British Gas acknowledged that the process “was not as smooth as it should have been”.

While most customers were informed of the change in December, Ofgem said this left them with “insufficient time” to switch suppliers.

“When such a fundamental change is being made, such as where meters can be topped up, energy suppliers need to communicate with their customers in plenty of time,” Philippa Pickford, the regulator’s director of retail, said. “British Gas should have informed all of their prepayment customers, many whom are in vulnerable situations, of the change to how to top-up their meters during the winter period.”

The errors may have left people without energy at the turn of the year, Ofgem said, and caused customers unaware of the change to make “wasted journeys” to shops that no longer offered the services they required.

British Gas, which is owned by Centrica, the FTSE 250 energy business, supplies about seven million households, down from a peak of about ten million a decade ago. It is paying £1.48 million in compensation to affected customers and has agreed to give £250,000 to Ofgem’s voluntary redress fund, which supports vulnerable consumers.

“We recognise that this transition was not as smooth as it should have been and we would like to apologise again to any customer impacted,” said the company, which said that its new top-up provider offered pre-payment customers the “best and most flexible” service.

A spokeswoman added: “We know that some prepayment customers are vulnerable and we take our responsibilities to them very seriously. We ensured that anyone who contacted us had heating and hot water — this included sending an engineer to manually add credit to the meter if the customer was unable to get to their nearest working top-up point.”

Ofgem noted that British Gas opted to close its general enquiries helpline on New Year’s Day, the day it switched pre-payment providers.