A major computer failure at Southern Water, which supplies 4.6m customers across the south of England, means that direct debits were not taken in early October, but will instead be double-billed in November.
Customers calling the water company’s helplines are greeted with a message saying: “We are really sorry, we have had an ongoing technical problem.” Up to 159,000 households in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire are understood to have been affected.
The company said direct debits that should have been taken on 5 and 10 October failed, and will instead be taken in November.
It promised to compensate customers who have been charged by their banks for a direct debit failure. The average combined water and sewage bill for a Southern Water customer is £418 a year.
In a note to customers, Southern Water blamed a “missing zero” for the problem. It said: “We’ve recently brought in a new IT services provider and unfortunately the transition was not as smooth as we’d have hoped. As a result of a processing issue the direct debit file that would collect payments on 5 October failed.
“We believed we would be able to resolve this issue by moving those direct debits due on 5 October into the next direct debit file on 10 October. However, we’ve since received feedback that some of these direct debits had been returned by banks. An immediate investigation showed there was a formatting issue with some of the payment reference numbers missing a ‘zero’, meaning in some cases banks were unable to process them.”
Southern Water sent emails to affected customers, but as they did not come from the usual company address some were concerned they were fraudulent messages.
“We understand some customers were concerned because the email came from a non southernwater.co.uk domain name. This email was sent out through our technical partners. As soon as we realised there was an error we wanted to let our customers know as soon as possible. We also made thousands of proactive calls to affected customers and posted on our social media and web pages in an attempt to reach as many customers as possible,” said Southern Water.
Southern Water was fined £20m in 2007 by regulator Ofwat for misreporting data and poor customer service, and in 2013 was fined £200,000 for sewage discharges.
