When I eventually managed to switch from EDF I was over charged on my final gas and electric bill even though they read the meter and I sent a reading in. After a three calls I was told the new supplier would be given this advanced reading so I would lose nothing! They couldn’t answer how I would explain the low reading if the new supplier read the meter within 2-3 months, (I would have a minus reading).

spotthelemon:

In my experience the little guy rarely wins...

I understand how you feel but the easiest way to turn the tables is to take a zero tolerance approach to service failure and raise a formal complaint strictly in accordance with the energy company's complaints procedure. This starts a fairly demanding clock for the response, provides an audit trail and defined escalation procedure at the conclusion of which if you remain disastisfied you are then entitled to refer the issue to the Energy Ombudsman, something they hate because its costs you nothing, but if funded on a similar basis to the Financial Ombudsman Service costs the energy company a hefty case fee.

It's not too late to formalize your issue as a "complaint". The timeclock should be reset to when the issue of concern first arose. You have nothing to lose and everything the gain.

In my experience the little guy rarely wins, I feel in a stonger position now though, if Scottish Powers final bill arrives, as they said it would, in the next day or so then they can't go back on their position and I should at least be able to ensure I don't lose out. That will also lay the blame clearly at EDFs door, if their online helpdesk was better this would probably have been sorted weeks ago, email helpdesks are much cheaper to run than phone based, by not putting resources & training into that, they force people to use the phone based help & cost themselves money. Switching suppliers is not rocket science, the just need to agree a switch date & get a meter reading on that date + set up a direct debit & type the change into the database, 8 weeks is ridicously long time to do that.While this is the first time I've switched energy suppliers in a long time I search for the best deal on most things & regularly switch savings accounts, car & house insurance, ISA's ,and very, very rarely have any problems & none of those take anything like 8 weeks.

So if you don't have a legal contract with either company, are you legally responsible for any gas usage for the relevant period ?

I can't see how, unless there is some legislation that covers this situation.

update. - when I logged in to edf today it said my gas contract had been cancelled, phoned them up, got through on second attempt in a couple of minutes. Got a very nice helpful lady, who checked up & said my previous supplier had refused the transfer. It seemed like their phone help service is fine & its was just the online help that was poor.I phoned Scottish power, 30-35 minute wait but they have a call back system, so after 45 minutes I got a phone call from a very nice helpful lady, who said my account with them had been closed, the final bill was on its way to me but they'd had to use an estimated reading becuase edf hadn't supplied them with one. As it turned out the estimate was very accurate. She then offered to phone edf to sort it out directly, but called back a while later to say she hadn't been able to get through but would try again tomorrow. So I'm currently in the strange position of both companies denying I'm their gas customer.

I've had an issue with switching to edf, the electricity went ok but the gas still isn't switched properly a month later, the problem is quite likely to be my previous provider Scottish Power playing silly beggers but communicating with EDF to identify the problem is like pulling teeth. they take ages to reply then send e-mails which consist of a single phrase. The first reply I got said "your gas supply switched on" & gave the date nothing else so I got back to them & explained they weren't accepting my final reading so I was still paying Scottish power even if technically my supply had been switched, over a week later they reply saying basically - go away we've sent you an email saying we're looking into it - which they hadn't

Catch up on how EDF treated three customer service issues here...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0116bdc/Dont_Get_Done_Get_Dom_Series_5_EDF/

The disappointing thing for me is not that mistakes happen (they do) but how abysmally slowly the issues appeared to be handled, even after being brought to EDF's attention by Dom.

Rather than getting on with a speedy resolution, apparently Dom was asked "why are you bringing so many cases to EDF"?

Some organisations just don't seem to get it. Sadly I'm not convinced the regulator gets it either.