Thousands of British Gas customers have received a payout after the firm admitted it failed to notify them about changes to their prepayment meters.
The supplier, which is Britain's largest gas and electricity provider, said it's paid out more than £1.73million in refunds over errors dating back to December 2019.
At the time, British Gas failed to inform a number of prepayment customers about a change to their top-up provider.
It also failed to notify them about a change in the minimum top-up spend.
Some customers lost their supply as a result, while others made wasted journeys to shops, only to discover they could no longer top-up their usage.
In addition, customers were unable to contact British Gas' enquiry line the day of the change.
What happened?
British Gas failed to notify around 270,000 prepayment customers about a change of top-up provider, from Paypoint to Payzone, which went live on 1 January 2020.
The supplier informed most of its customers of the change in top-up provider in December 2019.
These letters contained details not only of the change of top-up provider but also of the change in minimum top-up from £1 to £5.
Ofgem said this left insufficient time for customers to switch supplier if they found the new arrangements to be problematic.
The notification did not include telephone contact details, but instead contained links to the internet. Those customers unfamiliar with, or without access to, the internet may have struggled to contact British Gas in the event that they were struggling to top-up.
Additionally, British Gas closed its general enquiries line on 1 January 2020 – the go-live date.
Ofgem said that when British Gas decided to switch to Payzone, it failed to adequately communicate the changes to its customers.
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Who is affected?
Anyone who was not notified about the change in supplier at the time or was left without sufficient time to switch their supplier following the announcement. Those who were also not made aware of the change in minimum spend may also be owed money back.
Prepayment households who made wasted journeys to top up their meters may also be due a refund.
How can I claim the money back?
British Gas said it has already paid £1.48million to impacted customers for its failings and will pay an additional £250,000 into the energy redress fund.
However, if you were a customer during this period or were affected by the changes announced, you can get in touch to see if you're owed any money.
This can be done on the British Gas help and support page online or over the phone by calling 0330 100 0303.
You'll need your last bill or British Gas customer number to hand, you'll also need to be the bill-payer registered on the account.
A British Gas spokesperson said: "We chose to move our prepayment top up service to Payzone as we believe they offer the best and most flexible service for our customers and will add more outlets where our customers need them. We recognise that this transition was not as smooth as it should have been and we would like to apologise again to any customer impacted.
"We respect Ofgem’s decision and will be paying an additional £250,000 to the Voluntary Redress fund. We have already paid £1.48m in compensation to our prepayment customers who were negatively impacted by this change. There is no need for any customer to contact us as all those impacted have been paid.
"We know that some prepayment customers are vulnerable and we take our responsibilities to them very seriously. We ensured that anyone who contacted us had heating and hot water – this included sending an engineer to manually add credit to the meter if the customer was unable to get to their nearest working top up point."
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