Arrrggg, Energy companies!

I know people in both the public and private renteal sector who aren't allowed or are unable to change providers, for many even telly is piped in from a common arial to all flats.

IrishInManchesterUK said:

If at all possible, I’d also get the police involve

Skip the middle men and just call the army - they have about as much jurisdiction there ;)

Seriously though, there is no crime here - incompetence and possibly negligence at the very worst and certainly nothing the police would look into if you skipped all the procedures of escallation.

I suspect the police would direct you to either the ombudsman or a lawyer and tell you to stop wasting their time.

If at all possible, I’d also get the police involved, due to their greater legal powers of investigation on your behalf 

You need to speak to both citizens advice and the free legal advice centres as well as the local council - if you are friendly with the local police, I’d get them involved as well, as you could be a victim of some kind of scam - I’m more inclined to get the police involved, even at this late stage, especially if you have friendly relations with the police in your local area, as they would have greater legal powers to investigate on your behalf 

In some areas of council housing, because of local bye-laws, you don’t have a choice as to being billed monthly, having a prepayment meter or a smart meter, where only a prepayment smart meter is permitted and in some areas, there is only one permitted energy company that council tenants are allowed to use - councils should be doing more to help tenants when dealing with energy companies, perhaps taking up a case on their behalf 

What I’m saying is that a specific law needs to be passed in Parliament (I’m in the U.K.) immediately banning the practice of “outsourcing” customer support service functions outside of the U.K. by these companies, who need to be brought to heel and the only way to do this is by ever more draconian legislation that is properly enforced - India is well known as the scam call capital of the world, as are other countries like the Philippines - it should not be down to customers to research this, that is the job of the U.K. regulators appointed by government for this very purpose - there is a channel on YouTube that does scam-baiting calls to try and recover people’s money and he speaks fluent Hindi as an American in order to catch these scammers, where the Indian government is not doing enough to stop these scammers 

Depending on where you live you don't always have a massive choice of providers, we have BT for landline and internet, but not mobile because if you're more than a couple of hundred years from the A5 you have no signal, although it may have improved by now. We have a limited number of providers and most seem to require a BT landline, so why pay twice? Once you take into account the cost of a landline connection you've pretty much lost whatever saving you would of made from another provider. Most of the smart phone providers do thier own internet deals, but not having a smart phone, I'm unsure of how good they'd be?

We don't always have the same choice of energy providers either, many of the smaller ones don't cover us, they only cover big towns and cities.

Call centres are a nuisance, even if they have a centre based in the UK theres no guarantee that the place that sends out new equipment or whatever will be based here, or that the call centres find it any easier to talk to other parts of the same organisation that we do.

This is something your research on the provider should include to make sure they provide the UK call centers.

I know I did this for my broadband provider as explaining the issues to someone with a tenuous grasp of English was a frustrating experience and the technicalities of how I used my connection was a complicating factor that just made it insufferable.

The onus is on you to choose - if enough people do this then they will change their practices.

The downside is people tend to choose based on price and part of this is because the cheaper companies have outsourced support in another country (even Ireland is another country though - should we exclude them too for being outside the UK?)

You get what you pay for I guess.

Utilita have call centres outside of the U.K. (which they should not be allowed to do) and my issue is that if a company is offering services to a U.K. customer base, regardless of training or anything else, they must not be allowed to operate call centres for customer support from outside of the U.K. - especially in this day and age, this exposes customers to all manner of online scams and fraud aside from the language and cultural barriers - I’ve the same problem with Virgin Media and O2 mobile - customers should have the legal right to demand that when they make a call to a call centre, they can have on their account notes that they do not want their calls to customer services “landing” outside of the U.K. and to only be directed to a call centre within the U.K. only 

I'm with Utilita. They were the energy company providing the electricity when I moved in. I was being direct debited just over £300  a month.I live in a small 1 bedroom lounge,kitchen diner. My daughter agreed it was all rather iffy and phoned to try and sort things out for me Got absolutely nowhere. Then they decided more, than a few months later there was a fault re the supply of electricity to this block of flats.It was fixed and electricity(it's all electricity here) bill went right down.No apology.No offer to reduce  the OTT amount I was reckoned to owe, through no fault of mine.

I agree with raising a case with the Ombudsman. I've had very positive experiences with them.

Apparently in some areas they do, but not many, I agree it's daft.

I don’t know why they don’t adopt the French system of sending the data back through the power grid as depending on mobile signals or Wifi is silly 

Having an astigmatism I found that every photo I've tried to take just comes out wrong, an ex was really into photography and I tried loads of his cameras, we even tried photographing the same things and mine all came out with a squint.

I seem to be able to remember moments in time very accurately, so much so that I've been actively trying to forget some stuff. I find a lot of photo's really freaky, there's one of me, I think, aged about 14 and I really don't recognose myself and had to ask my Mum who the girl in the photo was, there nearly always seems to be a flatness to photographs, especially colour ones, even on large format that I find really difficult and if they're of people or animals I find quite scary. Maybe its related to my fear and dislike of masks, dolls, puppet and clowns and maybe even drag artists?

With all the AI, photoshopped fakery around are photos' more reliable anymore?

I refused to have a smart meter, we have to have signal boosters all over the house for all sorts of different things like the control box thermostat thing on the wall that talks to the boiler. In our case it's because of the materials the house is built from, some thick old stone walls, some engineering brick, slate and some we've not yet discovered, some materials don't allow signals through easily or at all. Smart meter manufacturers and energy companies don't seem to get this, I don't know why, do they make them to cope with another countries vernacular building materials, or the red brick of the London and home counties?

Similar problem with my energy company re a smart meter - problem made worse by use of non-U.K. call centre (which should be banned) 

They are a waste of time - best to go public with this, if you have not already taken this energy company involved to court, even allowing for the fact that the media is as corrupt as the courts these days 

Well from my perspctive (which started when I frist printed off my own film back in 1969 or so) you people who don't have cameras & take pictures are just incomprehensible! A camera is both a way of expressing ones artistic side through what you capture and how you do it, but for me more importantly, it's a way of freezing a moment in time that is more reliable in court than my memory. 

A practcial example being when I collided with a man in a van on a traffic island at a very low speed and the subsequent injury and time off work claims started to come in against me. although the accident was my fault, I had failed to clear the area into which I was moving my car believeing that he had in fact pulled onto the island but it was a very minor impact as the pictres I had taken showed. Upon examining them it was also obvious that this company vehicle lacked driver and passenger head restraints, which I believe saved my insurance company some considerable money.    

I have the same issue as I am analogue living in the digital world. Try explaining the concept to people is so frustrating as I keep being asked for a phone number and yet having told them, I do not have a phone, they are incapable of understanding.

I too have had a big bill although not as high as your alleged bill. I hope you manage to resolve the meter issue soon. 

I-Sperg, I don't have a camera, digital or otherwise! I don't know why this is so hard to get across to people.

WE do not owe 5K.

I've told them this and that I will contact BBC Watchdog, hopefully that will get thier collective butts into gear.