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Breaking up with British Gas (yet again)
Mouthy Money editor Edmund Greaves recounts why he’s ditched British Gas for the second time.
I have broken up with British Gas. For the second time in my adult life.
The first time was in fact years ago when I moved into my first flat in London. I inherited British Gas as an energy supplier from the previous tenant.
This was back in the days before the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis when energy deals were still (relatively) affordable, and there was a good breadth of deals in the market.
That was why I broke up with them at the time – purely because the energy price they offered was not competitive. We switched to Octopus Energy.
No hard feelings etc, but I do distinctly remember British Gas sending me a ridiculous mess of paperwork which I thought…um…bit much?
Here’s the post I put on Twitter (now X) at the time:
In those heady days we paid around £35 a month to heat and supply electricity to our one bed flat. Oh to have such bills again!
In the intervening years, my wife Ellyn and I have moved out of London, bought a house, got a dog and a baby and such.
Roll forward almost five years to the day, and history has repeated itself.
We bought our home during the midst of the cost-of-living crisis, when energy switching was not a thing, so we (for the second time) inherited British Gas as a supplier from the former owner. We didn’t bother switching, and that was our first mistake.
Now, regular readers may remember I have actually written about British Gas in this column recently. Although I didn’t name check them at the time. Not so lucky today, guys.
Feel free to read it and come back, but to cut a long story short we used more energy than anticipated last winter thanks to the arrival of our son Cosmo. This led to us going into quite a lot of energy debt with British Gas. £500 of it.
After a bit of careful calculation and negotiating, I got them to reduce our direct debit to £165 instead of £200. Job done, I thought.
British Gas strikes back
The story did not unfortunately end there, dear reader.
Every month since I reached that agreement with British Gas, it has attempted to increase our direct debit back above £200. This was despite, as expected, we were quite quickly vanquishing our energy deficit. At the most recent billing we had got it to £325, which had only taken about three months. Great.
Despite that, British Gas would not back down from try to force us to take a higher direct debit. Every month I would receive an email telling us our direct debit was increasing.
This reached a breaking point two weeks ago when this happened yet again. I decided enough was enough.
I called the firm to ask why it kept doing this. It was explained to me that they were simply basing forward charges on what we had previously used.
This was despite the fact that I had made several quite significant changes to our home to improve our energy efficiency and was pretty certain we’d be using a lot less energy moving forward (and as evidenced by our more recent usage).
No, British Gas were determined that I should be paying £200 a month for our energy. In fact, in the most recent episode they increased the direct debit even higher to £210.
The trouble here is that the company had us over a barrel, because we owed £325. Owing this money meant we were not free to leave and switch to a different provider.
We had to pay the debt first.
Fed up with the intransigence of the firm, I decided enough was enough. Despite needing cash for something else (tyres for our car if you must know) I decided to clear the debt and leave.
The ol’ switcheroo
There is good news and bad news in the energy market these days.
The bad news is the price cap has increased again. It has risen 10% from £1,568 to £1,717 per year for an average household usage level.
The good news, however, is that switching is back. We locked in a deal with Octopus Energy (hello old friend) which charges us £139 a month (based on average per-unit usage). Of course, this is still subject to change if we use more energy, but having a bit of surety in our bills (and not paying £210 a month) is a win.
If you want to switch yourself, then try a price comparison site to see what the best deal is. I don’t believe Octopus was the absolute cheapest but having been a customer before I was aware they have quite energy whizzy products and were generally quite good.
Octopus is also nice because it uses our smart meter readings to feed into an app which can tell me day-by-day usage almost immediately. We can track our consumption much more closely and keep on top of it.
I like the fact we can closely monitor usage with the app, and head off potential debt accruing before it gets out of hand.
More from Edmund Greaves
Bad British Gas
This is very much a personal review and experience. I am sure there are literally millions of ecstatic British Gas customers out there. Positively joyous. But I was not.
- I was tired of the fact that they let us run up debt over six months and didn’t lift a finger until we were badly in the red. But you can bet they were proactive as soon as we owed them a decent wedge.
- I was tired of the computer says no attitude that didn’t account for what was clearly a decrease in usage on our part.
- I was tired of doing a monthly dance to get them to decrease our direct debit to a more acceptable level – a level which was evidently bringing our debt down quickly.
- I was tired of having a smart meter that was basically useless to us despite feeding valuable usage data back to the company.
I am sure Octopus will have its own foibles. We shall see.
It gets weirder
As soon as we started our switching process, which was extremely easy, seamless in fact – British Gas started acting like a spurned lover.
I was texted three times in three hours saying it had an “exclusive offer” for me.
They rang me. I got emails. I was even approached by British Gas Twitter bots in the above tweets. It was an absolute bombardment of contact.
In other contexts, this is referred to as ‘love bombing’.
The company has mere hours to get me to change my mind before the switch takes hold, so bombards me with attempts to persuade me not to leave. It is an abysmal thing to do.
The thing that really pains me (and is often something I think wistfully about when it comes to personal finance) is that we are as ever in a fortunate position to have some cash to get out of the situation. Others don’t and so will be at the mercy of this kind of behaviour.
But my counsel, as it ever was with these matters, is do not be afraid to stand up to companies you feel are treating you poorly. They have not earned your good graces or submission to unfair practices.
So goodbye British Gas. It’s not me, it’s you. I was just trying to keep the lights on.
LISTEN: Edmund catches up with Chris as they discuss his energy bills, tipping, and cruise liners in this week’s Mouthy Money Podcast
Photo credits: Pexels
