An automated voice is no comfort to a widow faced with soaring gas bills
sir – My wife and I have a friend who is a widow in her 80s. Recently we found her in a distressed state. She said that her gas bill, normally about £30 per month, had gone up to £170.
She does not bank online and her bank has recently closed its branch in the nearest town four miles away. She tried phoning her supplier, British Gas, only to be told by an automated voice on each attempt that the wait time was “more than an hour”.
So distressed has she become that she has had to visit her GP, who suggested that she was suffering from anxiety brought on by the situation with her gas supply. She is now taking anti-anxiety medicine and has managed to get her bill altered. I can only say that this is a disgraceful way to deal with any customer.
David J Hartshorn
Badby, Northamptonshire
sir – Gillian Courage (Letters, May 5) writes of her energy supplier’s grab for more money. The same applies to our long-term supplier, Ovo Energy. On Wednesday we received two emails, one complaining about a lack of meter reading and another telling us that, based on our smart meter reading, we had to increase our direct debit.
We had been concerned about installing a smart meter for fear of this type of surveillance, but in January we agreed to it and used it to reduce our usage by half. We have been cold.
The second email disingenuously added our usage before and after the smart meter installation to forecast an annual deficit, although we are currently within budget. On telephoning we were told it was likely we would be sent an email threatening to increase the direct debit within 10 days, whereupon our remedy would be to lodge a complaint.
I do hope Ofgem is paying attention.
John Hanson
Canterbury, Kent
sir – I live in a relatively modern, well-insulated house. I needed a new boiler, and consulted a heat pump specialist. The cost of installing one and changing all the radiators was nearly £30,000.
I use roughly 21,000 kwh of gas each year at 7p per kwh, which comes to £1,470. Heat pumps are said to be about three times more efficient and therefore would use, say, 7,000 kwh of electricity at 27p per kwh, which comes to £1,890. I fail to see how a heat pump would save me money. I settled for a new gas boiler at £2,400.
Michael York
Holmer Green, Buckinghamshire
sir – It’s a bit rich of the Government to propose penalising those of us with older houses, for which it is notoriously difficult and expensive to reach an energy performance certificate rating of even a C, while at the same time building thousands of new houses with no solar panels, no heat pumps, and probably a gas connection (“Failure to install heat pumps could knock house values”, report, May 4).
David Statham Stratford-on-avon, Warwickshire