EDINBURGH man Paul McDougall came home from work last Friday to find that his flat in Leith had been broken into by Scottish Power.
The electricity company made their way into the flat McDougall shares with his partner Emma Stephenson, without the permission of their landlord, and replaced the meter with a prepayment meter. Despite a weekend of phone calls, McDougall, 33, who says he is on top of his bills, is still none the wiser as to why.
“Eventually we found a Scottish Power warrant lying on the floor crumpled in the heap which wasn’t addresses to us, just had a number on it,” McDougall says.
“It told us that they had replaced both our meters with prepaid meters and that we would be charged for the visit and for all the work that has been done as well. We’ve lived there 11 months and paid our bills every single month.”
McDougall and Stephenson were then left with a prepayment meter on emergency credit and no card to top it up with. They’ve spent the last four days worried that the lights might go out.
“Yesterday was my day off and I spent a total of five hours on the phone to them, four times I was cut off after being kept on hold for 45 minutes,” McDougall says. “They kept promising to transfer me and that’s when I got cut off. It’s an 0845 number, it’s going to cost me an absolute fortune.
“I eventually got through to someone who was doing their best to help me, they found and told me they’ve made an ‘incredible blunder’ here. It was meant to be either a different address or someone who used to live here a long time ago.
“I’m getting absolutely nowhere. I’ve phoned the police and got an incident number. They may have had a warrant but it’s for the wrong address so as far as I’m concerned they’ve invaded my privacy.
“I don’t know what else I can do to get this sorted.”
Earlier this year it was revealed that more than half a million prepayment energy meters have been forcibly installed in people’s homes over the last six years, 97,000 in the last year alone.
Energy suppliers are able to gain a court order to install a pre-pay meter when customers run up debt. Although they are put in place to try and stop the customer getting into more debt they can cost £300 more than a regular meter and around £200 to install or replace.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, says the meters should only be installed a “last resort”.
In their briefing to energy companies the watchdog says “suppliers should demonstrate when applying for the warrant that they have carried out appropriate checks” on tenants.
A spokeswoman for ScottishPower said: “We apologise to Mr McDougall for the upset this matter has caused. This is a highly unusual occurrence and a full investigation will be carried out. We have been in contact with Mr McDougall to apologise directly and discuss the matter further.”
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