British Gas pays out to customers again

Supplier settles further £1.1m with customers after new licence breaches reported

Big six supplier British Gas has made reparations payments of £1.1m after it failed to keep appointments with customers or offer them compensation for the inconvenience.

The payment follows another redress package of £9.5m confirmed earlier this month, which British Gas offered customers after Ofgem found it had failed to comply with licence obligations to treat customers fairly.

The regulator is also currently conducting an investigation into British Gas’s practices around the termination of domestic contracts.

The latest compensation payment of £1.1m has been doled out to around 12,000 customers – mostly micro-businesses.

It is to make up for the inconvenience caused when third party agents failed to keep appointments with customers, and for British Gas’s failure to offer compensation for this, which is a regulatory requirement.

British Gas proactively reported this process failure to Ofgem and Martin Crouch, the regulator’s senior partner for improving regulation, said the supplier had done the “right thing” in owning-up to its non-compliance.

Crouch added that British Gas “has since improved its processes to make sure that, when appointments are missed or not kept on time, all customers receive the compensation they’re entitled to.

“It’s crucial that suppliers keep appointments on time, and make amends when things go wrong.”

In a statement, British Gas said: “We discovered the error last year and reported it to Ofgem. We  have apologised to the affected customers, given them all compensation and an additional goodwill payment. In April this year we introduced new system checks to ensure this can’t happen again.”

Each customer has been paid £90 compensation.