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| This is what it took to get a correct final bill |
Some significant time ago, I wrote about our experiences between Scottish Power and Spark Energy. It's taken a lot to get resolved including small claims court, regulator action and a lot of wasted paperwork. Whilst it's difficult to put an exact value on their financial throughput they're certainly able to invest in customer service.
Background
After moving to a 3rd supplier earlier last year and letting the dust settle, we discovered how little honesty had been involved.
Spark essentially refused to relinquish control of one of the supplies, claiming that there was an unpaid bill - actually they had failed to complete their own data entry procedures during the original transfer to them. Because they delayed the transfer one of our energy supplies was put onto the "default" tariff - the more expensive one they're legally obliged to move you off.
To compound the situation they then claimed that they'd never told us the supply was incomplete; so I sent them a subject access request to include all call recordings to prove them wrong. After the usual to-and-fro regarding the £10 access fee - an obstruction that disappears with GDPR - they relented when I suggested they simply add the fee to the outstanding bill.
Any organisation that sees the £10 SAR fee as a realistic way of recouping the cost of answering a SAR has a seriously ineffective accounting approach. This fee was originally instituted in the last century when email was not readily or normally available - so would cover the cost of print & post.
During this process - and without even sending us a final bill - Spark sent two separate debt collection firms after us at the same time. Each were told that there were legal issues relating to the case; that the matter was with Spark and that they were not to contact us again (i.e assumed rights of entry revoked). Some small part of me wished that one of them had attempted to get a CCJ, because I could then raise a counter-claim directly against Spark which included compensation for distress.
Spark made no attempt to reply to the messages above, even though they were included in the CC line.
As a side note, and during the final stages of conversation with the supplier; Spark noted that they had supplied the final bill to a portal - which they had neither told us about, nor notified us of the arrival of any document on it. Despite our standard opt-out of marketing messages this would be considered a "service message" and therefore be exempt from PECR section 22. There's simply no excuse for that level of communication in 2017.
I suggested that Spark use the same document sharing portal that they use for their bills and statements; I suggested that they upload to a file sharing service I would make available to them with credentials I would supply them. No - it would have to be via post.
£10 barely covers postage of a bunch of CD's - even though I pointed out that I don't own a computer that still has a CD / DVD drive - never mind the FTE cost of fulfilling the SAR request. Essentially the £10 fee has become largely meaningless - A business adhering to the law (the DPA in this case) must absorb this as a cost of doing business, based on the risk of how many SAR's they expect to receive vs. the frequency which is reasonable to respond to per customer. Most organisations I even feel the need to SAR often realise something is amiss and waive the fee - SME's usually get some free DPO advice as a reward if there are actually any issues.
After about two months they'd failed to send anything at all - frankly I half expected them to tell me they'd delivered it to a previous address. I wish I'd checked as this is a far more serious breach of the DPA.
However I didn't - and raised a claim in the courts for SAR failure as well as raising the issue with the energy ombudsman. None if this is a quick process and you can expect the company you're dealing with to spin it out as long as possible to try and make you lose interest. Involve the regulator and they start charging the company for every day the complaint is active.
The EO charges roughly £250 per complaint per day back to the supplier for each case, which means that they'll start taking it [slightly] more seriously.
During this process and on regular intervals Spark continued to send more debt collection firms our way. In total five different firms were involved and each were told to jog on. Yet not one direct message from Spark attempting to resolve the issue directly.
The Result
Unsurprisingly, in 2017 Spark were told to compensate us for the trouble, adjust the bill to correct the charge (the tariff we actually signed up for). Spark labelled this in their post-regulator letter as a "goodwill gesture", but they were simply told to compensate us then correct the bill - which then reduced the cost further.
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| The only admission of failure on Sparks part is highlighted |
The EO refused to tell Spark to enhance their customer processes to prevent this happening again saying that it "wasn't within the scope of their powers". I would imagine that with the number of complaints being swept under the rug and emerging with the EO is roughly 85% of complaints lodged with providers, and of those (according to the EO 2016 stats PDF): 63% (of nearly 85k complaints) upheld or settled, with another 30% listed as 'maintained'. Only 7% of complaints lodged with OE were rejected.
Surely something is wrong where a BAU failure demand rate is at 85% of customer complaints being dealt with by a 3rd party?
It cost Spark £250 pd x 3 months for the OE case, plus their lawyers retainer to answer the small claims case (which was eventually struck out when I failed to receive the DQ request from the courts) - I've no idea what their defence was for refusing to fulfil a SAR without grounds to withhold; and most of their claim to the supply liability. Peanuts in comparison to their bottom line - which is why they simply continue not to care at all.
The final bill was around £15 - which still included the £10 SAR fee they had taken last year. At the time of writing Spark never responded to the SAR. They never admitted fault for the switches in either direction; even though both our current supplier, Scottish Power and the regulator conclusively identified them as the cause of the problems.
