While studying in Glasgow, my daughter lived in a rented flat with a prepayment electricity meter. Shortly after she moved out in the summer of 2022 she was contacted by ScottishPower about a £1,000 debt.
Given it was a pay-as-you-go meter, we questioned how this was possible. But instead of investigating, the debt was passed to a recovery firm, which started chasing her for money in March 2023.
The debt collection firm told us the £1,090 debt had built up between December 2017 and July 2022. In 2017, my daughter was still at school and living at home. She only lived in the flat from November 2020 to July 2022.
Because she was studying, I offered to sort this out. I went back to ScottishPower to raise a complaint and threatened to contact the Energy Ombudsman. Finally, last July, 16 months later, ScottishPower confirmed there had been an error during an IT upgrade. It said the debt had been recalled and the payment default removed from my daughter’s credit file.
I thought that was the end of it until last month when I started getting emails and texts from a different debt collection agency. I contacted ScottishPower but it didn’t respond.
Even if I get this new case closed, how can I be sure that the debt has really been cancelled and that any “black marks” have been removed from her credit file?
JL, Perth
My goodness, what a saga – and one that is genuinely Kafkaesque, given the flat had a prepayment meter that only allowed her to go £5 into the red.
In your full letter you correctly point out that under back billing rules, a supplier cannot charge for energy used more than 12 months ago if you were not correctly billed for it. But along the way there have been numerous red herrings.
When I asked ScottishPower to investigate, it confirmed the “debt” was written off last year. The issue resurfaced because it then sold written-off debts to a third party. Your daughter’s account was among them even though her case should have been dealt with as a billing adjustment.
ScottishPower has now eventually established that payments made by your daughter and her flatmates were being credited to a closed account in the landlord’s name and this was £106 in credit. It is refunding this sum along with a goodwill gesture of £250.
A spokesperson for ScottishPower said: “We have withdrawn all action and apologise for the inconvenience this has caused. We’ve issued a goodwill payment in recognition of the customer’s experience and can confirm there will be no adverse effect on her credit rating.”
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