Page 50 Daily Mail, Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Get it Together!
50 MoneyMail
Refund: Jan and Bill Burrough
with their pet dog, Freebieteam, or their emails and letters
have been ignored.
Mark Todd, co-founder of price
comparison site Energyhelpline,
says: ‘Ofgem should make sure
su p p l i e r s w h o t a k e o n f a i l e d
customer bases are able to cope
with the increased customer service
demands this brings.’
He adds: ‘Often for a small com-
pany it’s a cheap way to get a large
number of customers at once.’
Farmer Jan Burrough had to go to
the Ombudsman to get £1,120 back
from Together Energy — a year
after the supplier took over her
OneSelect account.
She had been with OneSelect for
two years and had built up a large
amount of credit, partly due to the
fact the supplier had failed to adjust
her £176-a-month bill after her son
moved his business from her Devon
property and her usage dropped.
Jan, 67, and husband Bill, 72, found
out Together Energy had taken over
their account in December 2018, and
a month later she began asking for
her credit refund.
She says: ‘I called and emailed, but
I’d rarely get someone
to pick up the phone or
reply to an email.
‘When they did, I was
told they were still
waiting on a final bill
from OneSelect.’
Jan had submitted
her monthly readings
t h r o u g h To g e t h e r
Energy’s website.
But the supplier took
seven months before it
gave her a first bill,
which finally brought her bills down
to £40.
Yet she was still waiting for her
OneSelect balance refund, and even-
tually she went to the Ombudsman.
It ruled in her favour, but she didn’t
get her £1,120 refund until Decem-
ber, plus a £40 goodwill gesture.
Together Energy later found that
Jan’s OneSelect balance had been
incorrect and she was actually owed
a further £1,100. This refund arrived
in Jan’s bank account last night.
She says: ‘They never gave us a
choice when One Select went bust,
but I think I’d have preferred to be
switched to a Big Six supplier.’
A n o t h e r f o r m e r O n e S e l e c t
customer, John Lyons, had to wait a
year for his £239 refund. The retired
postal worker applied for the credit
in January 2019, and eventually tookhis case to the Ombudsman, which
ruled in his favour in August.
But John, 73, from Southminster,
Essex, didn’t receive the money until
December, plus £75 compensation
ordered by the Ombudsman.
Energy companies can bid to take
on a collapsed firm’s customers and
become a ‘supplier of last resort’.
Ofgem has the final say, but says a
new supplier would have to ensure a
‘smooth transition for customers’.
L a s t m o n t h
Together Energy’s
ch i e f e x e c u t i v e
P a u l R i c h a r d s
ap o l o g i s e d t o
customers, hours
before the supplier
was featured on
the BBC’s Rip Off
Britain show. In a
statement on the
c o m p a n y ’ s w e b -
s i t e , h e w r o t e :
‘Taking on these
customers has been a challenge...
consequently, we have been late in
p r o c e s s i n g f i n a l b i l l s , o u r
communications have deteriorated,
and email response has been slow.
For that I am very sorry.’
When Money Mail asked Together
Energy whether, as a small supplier,
it had had the resources to take on
so many customers at once, it
pointed the finger at OneSelect.
It said it inherited a lot of ‘wrongly
calculated bills’ from OneSelect, and
the supplier had been at the bottom
of Citizens Advice customer service
table when it collapsed.
An Ofgem spokesman says: ‘We are
aware of customer concerns and
continue to engage closely with
Together Energy as it works to
improve its performance.’
[email protected]WHEN energy minnow OneSelect
w e n t b u s t , a n o t h e r s m a l l f i r m
successfully bid for its 36,000 custom-
ers and took on their accounts.
It meant the Dunbartonshire-based Together
Energy, which had just 100 staff of its own and
outsourced a further 40 in South Africa,
increased its customer total by 60 pc — from
60,000 to 96,000 overnight. But since then, the
three-year-old firm has crashed to the bottom
of consumer group Which?’s ratings table.
Together now has 150,000 customers — 1 pc
the size of British Gas’s 15 million. But the
number of letters and emails Money Mail hasreceived about the supplier dwarfs several of
its Big Six rivals.
Industry experts and customers are asking
why regulator Ofgem ever allowed such a small
firm to take on so many customers.
This newspaper has now handed a dossier of
complaints to the supplier and Ofgem, many
from readers who have been unable to get
through to the supplier’s customer serviceComplaints rocket as energy minnow
is handed 36,000 extra customers...
By Fiona Parker
HOUSEHOLDS using automatic
energy switching services could
be overpaying by £70 a year
because firms are failing to do
p ro p e r c o m p a r i s o n s , c h a r it y
Citizens Advice has warned.
Auto-switching services promise
to keep bill-payers on the cheapest
p o s s i ble t a r i f f by c o n st a nt ly
comparing deals on the market.
Yet Citizens Advice says some
compare tariffs from fewer than 15out of around 70 possible energy
suppliers. The result is some
customers are paying £70 a year
more than if they’d found a good
deal and switched themselves.
The charity, which is calling for
regulation of the services, says
so m e aut o - sw it c h e rs p rov i d e
inaccurate or unclear information,
making it difficult for consumers
to make informed choices.
[email protected]Auto-switching doesn’t pay