Blog Post

E.ON pays compensation to customers following energy billing error

Richard Simmonds • Apr 23, 2021

Energy supplier E.ON has paid over £600,000 after an energy billing error resulted in thousands of customers being hit with extra bank charges.

What happened?

Over Christmas over a million E.ON customers were hit by an IT glitch that took debits early and without warning leaving many being hit by bank charges and being overdrawn and in debt.

Direct debits that should have been taken after the Christmas period were instead taken on Christmas Eve and left many customers furious with the energy supplier. Things were made worse after E.ON said that no refunds would be able to be made until 29 December.

E.ON immediately flagged the issue to the energy regulator and blamed the issue on a technical fault.

According to the supplier the affected payments were taken due to a technical fault, following changes they made to friendly credit hours for pre-payment (PPM) customers between Christmas and New Year.

The incident made national news and caused reputational damage both to the supplier and the wider energy supply industry.

“This error should not have happened, and it was unfortunate that it was so close to Christmas. We apologised to those affected at the time and I apologise to them again now. As soon as we noticed the issue, we took immediate steps to put things right for our customers,” said E.ON chief executive Michael Lewis.

Also read: Ofgem greenlights market wide half-hourly settlement across the retail electricity market

What has E.ON done?

As we have stated many times it always pays for an energy supplier to own up and take responsibility for any mistakes they make.

As such, E.ON has so far paid out £55,039 to those customers impacted by the computer glitch and also committed to continue to pay out for further legitimate claims from customers who contact them with evidence that they suffered losses as a consequence.

E.ON also promised to pay £627,312 to the energy redress fund in recognition of its failure to address underlying system and governance weaknesses, which would have prevented the error from occurring.

“Ofgem expects suppliers to adhere to the terms of contracts they have with customers, in particular the agreed Direct Debit payment dates. This failure is a reminder to suppliers that when making changes to their systems, they need to undertake appropriate checks to avoid any unintended consequences for customers.

“Ofgem is always prepared to work with suppliers who have failed to comply with their obligations, but who have self-reported and are determined to put things right, as E.ON has done,” said Anna Rossington, director of retail at Ofgem.

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