E.ON forced to shell out £1.7m after overcharging customers
An average of £14.83 will be paid out to E.ON customers overcharged after price rises.
E.ON has been ordered to pay back around £1.4 million to customers who were overcharged following price rises or wrongly charged exit fees.
The energy provider has also agreed to pay an additional £300,000 as a “goodwill gesture” to a consumer fund run by Ofgem and Age UK.
The 94,000 affected customers have been identified and contacted. They can expect an average rebate of £14.83, which includes 8% interest on the amount they were incorrectly charged.
What E.ON did wrong
According to Ofgem rules, suppliers must give their customers 30 days’ notice of a price rise in order that they may move elsewhere before the price rise kicks in.
If the customer tells the supplier they plan to move within this timeframe they should not incur exit fees or higher charges, even if the switch takes place after the price rise kicks in.
However, E.ON failed to follow these rules.
If you’re switching because of a price rise it’s incredibly important to keep these rules in mind and be extra vigilant when checking your energy bill to ensure that you haven’t been overcharged.
Even if you aren’t switching, make sure you’re paying the right amount – as we revealed in Energy companies keep £1.2 billion of our savings, more than half of us are paying more than we should each year, by an average of £80 a customer.
Cashing in
Energy firms are not exactly at their most popular currently, with five of the big six having announced price rises to cash in on the winter weather, despite many boasting impressive profits this year.
If you’re in the market for a new gas and electricity supplier, why not make use of our energy comparison tool?
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If we based our understanding of wind energy on the opinion of every dreary luddite who happens to notice that one particular array is static at any given time we might as well take advice on snow clearance from someone who lives in the Gobi desert. Wind and wave energy are inexhaustible and generator prices are coming down. Solar power is getting cheaper and more efficient all the time and energy neutral homes are easily achievable. Again, just because someone has a poor solar installation we are expected to take that anecdotal situation as a guide to the norm? Some cars only do 14mpg so all cars must be terrible on fuel, according to this nonsense logic. Other than bearings needing maintenance there is virtually nothing to go wrong with wind turbines and solar panels have been around long enough to know that when properly constructed they have a very long service life.
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I have the key meter and I did find EON prices high when I first switched. I think I'will return to my previous supplier
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Instead of spending vast sums of taxpayers money on boondoggle 'green energy' schemes, where the poor old taxpayer gets smacked once to build it, and then again to buy the more highly priced energy, we should be having a national push to improve insulation standards of homes. I know it's sort of going on now, but currently the focus has moved to overpaying people to stick PV panels on their roofs or to erect windfarms ( which are becoming deeply unpopular with the locals who have to look at and listen to them). Usually, when I pass a windfarm, if there is a lot of wind, they are shut down. If there is no wind, they are not working, and if the wind is like Goldilocks porridge, just right, half of them are off line for maintenance. My youngest sister took advantage of the government boondoggle for PV panels, and I can't blame her. Cash in her bank was at risk and earning peanuts, and now she's getting over 8% return on the thousands she 'invested'. The panels, on a perfect day, can just about heat a kettle. Meanwhile, the long suffering taxpayer picks up the tab to pay my sister. I'm betting the system will degrade and need expensive repairs long before there is a return on the investment. that goes for the windfarms too. I agree with albatross5 !00%. Let's be the first to sign long term contracts with the USA while the gas prices are at historic lows. Frack on here, frack on from over the pond. Then when Russia turns off the taps again, we'll be in a happier position. We should also stockpile nuclear fuel in a secure facility while uranium ore prices are depressed. It would be a sensible strategic move, even if we never needed it and just re-sold it in twenty years at an enormous profit.
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27 November 2012