HOW I FOUGHT THE BULLIES AND WON £50

LAST autumn, a new type of junk mail began to appear among the pizza menus and charity begging letters on the doormat of my West London flat.

Sent in official- looking envelopes, they came from my gas and electricity supplier, First Utility. Each instructed me to ‘upgrade to a smart meter’ in order to ‘get your gas and electricity bills under control’.

As far as I’m concerned, my gas and electricity bills are already ‘under control’.

And I’ve no desire to take a day off so workmen can fit a vaguely Orwellian device that will almost certainly become useless when I switch supplier.

The letters were consigned swiftly to the bin. Various similar emails met the same fate, too.

Nevertheless, the marketing blitz continued.

One day in mid-October, things took an more intrusive turn, when lunch was interrupted by the ping of a text message. It was ‘ just a friendly reminder from First Utility to call our partner Siemens (on an 0345 number) to arrange your smart meter installation’.

Irritated by this increasingly high-pressure campaign, I wrote to the energy company, formally asking it to stop contacting me about smart meters. A simple request, one might think. But it was not to be.

In response, First Utility claimed that it would take me off its own ‘smart meter mailing list’.

Yet, somewhat bizarrely, it added that this wouldn’t actually prevent new text messages from arriving.

These had, apparently, been sent by Siemens, a German technology firm it had hired, as a sub-contractor, to install the devices.

To prevent this other firm from continuing to bother me, I was blithely advised to ‘contact them directly’.

There are several problems with this response — not least that I’d no contractual relationship with Siemens and no memory of agreeing to have my personal phone number shared with it, or anyone else.

I therefore asked First Utility to explain why it had passed it on and when, if ever, I’d consented.

Its response? A boilerplate message claiming it had been handed out as part of a ‘government led initiative to let every household know about smart meters by 2020’.

Since this was obviously false (the Government has not instructed utility firms to give our personal data to third parties), I did what every consumer messed around by an energy company ought to do at the earliest opportunity and declared that I wished to ‘raise a formal complaint’.

There followed one of the more Kafka- esque experiences of my adult life, in which a succession of the firm’s ‘ case handlers’ sent a variety of evasive emails, claiming their ‘ processes’ are ‘in line with the Data Protection Act’. Awkwardly, for them at least, the marketing wing of First Ut i l ity wasn’t listening.

As a result, the firm continued, despite my repeated requests, to send out regular, pushy messages, pestering me to accept a smart meter.

During the month that fol l owed my original complaint, I received three more unsolicited emails ( several containing very basic grammatical errors), one letter and, on November 21, yet another irritating text message.

BY CHRISTMAS, following several apologies, along with an attempt by First Utility to declare my complaint ‘closed’, I gave the firm a week to sort its act out, before I escalated things to Ofgem and the Information Commissioner.

Amazingly, they telephoned me within a few days, offering £50 compensation and promising (correctly, this time) that the hectoring would finally stop.

I went away a little richer and a lot more certain that energy giants are the opposite of smart.