British Gas has paid £2.65 million in refunds, compensation and redress after it misinformed customers by issuing incorrect terms and conditions about exit fees, wrongly charged them to some customers and applied incorrect charges to others after their fixed deal came to an end.
Ofgem’s investigation found that British Gas provided 2.5 million customers with incorrect terms and conditions, which stated that exit fees were payable during the 49 day period before their fixed deal expires.
Under licence conditions, a customer is generally entitled to switch at any time during or after this “switching window” without having to pay an exit fee.
This switching window is designed to encourage customers to switch to a better deal before they are rolled onto a default tariff at the end of their contract.
British Gas wrongly charged 1,698 of its fixed deal customers exit fees totalling £64,968 when they switched supplier during the switching window.
A further 94,211 customers were overcharged £782,450 by British Gas after they decided to switch supplier during the switching window. Due to a system error, the supplier did not extend these customers’ fixed-term contracts, instead wrongly rolling them onto its more expensive standard variable tariff rate.1
The same system error also led to 18,095 customers who decided to switch being wrongly charged at a cheaper rate.
Ofgem opened an investigation in July 2017 following concerns raised by MoneySavingExpert.com.
Before the investigation concluded, British Gas refunded in full all customers who had been overcharged by more than £1 and paid £502,633 in compensation to them.
Following Ofgem’s findings, British Gas agreed to pay a further £244,770 in compensation to customers wrongly charged exit fees and the standard variable tariff and pay £1,050,229 into Ofgem’s consumer redress fund.