Crusader D-Day hero’s power shocker
ELDERLY electricity customer Irving Golding was ticking along nicely with his power supplier Eon but then another company, Toto Energy, took over his account by mistake and chaos ensued. The blunder last March left Irving, 93, an RAF D-Day veteran, worried sick and in the dark for months about his charges, bills and who his supplier now was.
“I never wanted to leave Eon,” he told Crusader when he appealed for our help in July. “I’ve done nothing wrong but I’m not allowed to return until this other company Toto releases me. It can’t be right to treat customers like this.”
Irving had been the victim of what’s known in the industry as an “erroneous transfer” which occurs more often than might be supposed. Some 53,000 – or just under one per cent of switches a year – are screwups, carried out with no warning and against consumers’ wishes.
Irving had never heard of Toto until Eon sent him a goodbye letter saying it was closing his account. Alarmed he contacted them and discovered he was now with a company he was unaware of.
Eon told Toto about the problem and his desire to go back but there the matter foundered.
This coincided with Toto, one of the new breed of smaller energy companies, being plagued by customer service issues with many finding it difficult to contact them, discovering direct debit payments being taken months after leaving the company or struggling to get their credit balances refunded.
In July Toto apologised for standards that had fallen short of what is expected and pledged improvements to its customer care team. When Eon met a brick wall trying to get Irving back, Crusader took up the fight.
While he wanted to know how the mistake had occurred the most unacceptable aspect was the time it was taking Toto to return him and not knowing the state of his payments, given he had never authorised transferring the direct debit. In this limbo he feared he might be cut off.
We weren’t too impressed either when Toto told us it could still take up to another eight weeks to get Irving back to where he once was.
Its first explanations about “working to industry standards” made no sense. And another of its offers to speed up things would have involved him asking Toto to switch him formally and completing the transfer forms. But that was the last kind of hassle the disabled pensioner needed, we explained.
It would also have made him a customer of Toto, which he had never been. Then, had that process hit problems, he would have been in even deeper trouble and with potentially fewer rights when it came to compensation than by staying put in no man’s land until the utter fiasco was resolved.
But should customers plunged into this position have to wait so long, we asked the industry regulator Ofgem.
Apparently not. While restoration does involve the two suppliers working together there is a standard
Wrong sWitch deal
A BETTER deal for consumers suffering from an erroneous transfer is now on the cards.
Regulator Ofgem is consulting on introducing automatic compensation when switching goes wrong. In the meantime, if it happens, cite Ofgem’s guidance on 20 days or as soon as possible to return to normal service. process in place for them to follow, a spokesperson explained. “These codes require that customers should receive confirmation of the restoration of their supply within 20 working days. However, where a customer has been erroneously transferred, we would expect the suppliers involved to restore them as soon as possible and without any undue delay, and that the customer’s supply should continue as if it had occurred without interruption, and they should be billed accordingly.”
After our protests, action was taken. An incorrect registration on the national database had caused the delays, according to Toto.
But it was still insisting to us that its six-to-eight weeks industry time frame was correct.
Irving has been returned to Eon on a tariff best suited to his needs and when he thanked us he said Toto had offered him £100 compensation and cancelled all bills for those “wilderness” months. “But without you, Crusader,” he added, “I’d probably still have been stuck.”