Does your energy supplier top the complaints league table?

I have been with Coop energy since last year and find their simple billing system enables me to work out the bill at any time.

I give British Gas my meter readings every month and they work out how much I owe and take it by direct debit so it is like “pay as you go” so I am always up to date unlike two other suppliers who told me my monthly payment would be x-amount only to find in both cases I owed them over £200.00 at the end of the year.

I am disabled following a brain injury and had switched to Npower the month before the accident.

For the first year it seemed everything was OK then suddenly I received a bill for £1500 from my previous supplier British Gas for a couple of days usage. After checking that they were using a wrong meter reading I repeatedly refused to pay. I had a year of harassment before after writing the CEO and Finance Director of the parent company Centrica and with a copy alleging fraud to their external auditors the continual harassment stopped.

I then had cause to complain to Npower after they had not billed me the rates they had emailed me I would be paying . After at least 50 emails from me and having got nowhere I complained to the Energy Ombudsman who after 2 years agreed that they were wrong and should repay me. The Energy Ombudsman refused to demand any compensation for the 50 emails and continual harassment which was caused by npower incorrectly misreading my gas meter.

Since then I have had to spend hundreds of hours reconciling my accounts and discovered to my horror that after a further 40 emails that Npower have issued 6 secret bills and never ever informing me of these. It was only after repeated requests for explanations from their so called Executive Complaints, that I discovered the missing bills.

Now I have all the bills I have also discovered that Npower have repeatedly billed me according to their estimates and never according to my meter readings which mean significantly lower prices.

A year ago I asked for a repayment of the substantial credit I have built up which is over £1000. Every annual discount I have had to insist they pay and credit to my account which at £115 per annum is not insubstantial.

All npower do is either refuse to answer and or write rubbish which is because their staff are not professionals (I am an accountant and MBA and have never come across this level of incompetence and failure to comply with contract law.

I would strongly recommend everyone avoid Npower as they simply have absolutely no morality and have never offered a penny in compensation for all the emails and hard work I have done to prove they have substantially overbilled me in these 6 secret bills.

Try to get them to act is impossible and to even show an ounce of compassion is clearly beyond their staff who seem trained simply to lie and lie and refuse to deal with valid complaints.

I have never come across an organisation of this size which operates so questionably and with this level of repeated incompetence…

What is worse is that the Energy Ombusdman does nothing and it is quite clear that my repeated requests they apply the law (on contract and harassment as detailed in Which in several recent landmark cases) is ignored. The Energy Ombudsman is also useless and simply toothless and clearly a poodle in the pockets of npower as staff at npower have told me weeks before the Energy Ombudsman wrote to me that the Ombudsman would offer nothing for the constant harassment for over a year and offer not one penny for having to write the emails (in total over 90) to npower’s so called Executive Complaints section .