iSupply to pay £1.5m over customer failings

Retailer iSupply Energy has agreed a £1.5 million redress package after a number of failings involving more than 115,000 customers over a six-year period.

The supplier’s 190,000 customer accounts were acquired from Swedish state-owned Vattenfall by EDF earlier this year. The vast majority of customers have already been transferred to EDF, with the remainder due to do so over the next few weeks.

Ofgem said iSupply made a number of failings between 2013 and 2019 including incorrectly charging customers and inadequate priority services register registration.

The energy regulator said iSupply had insufficient governance and processes in place to prevent and swiftly address non-compliance, resulting in a “range of issues that ultimately caused consumer harm”.

All issues have been rectified and iSupply has agreed to pay a mix of refunds and goodwill payments as recompense.

In December last year the supplier reported that it had not correctly protected 72,331 customers’ tariffs where they had decided to switch either tariff or supplier after reaching the end of a fixed term contract or charges for their standard variable tariff had increased. For this it paid more than £1.2 million in redress.

Following its investigation into the matter, iSupply confirmed that 44,139 customers had been impacted by incorrect VAT charges, with 20,981 being overcharged. This resulted in it paying more than £180,400.

Due to a system error, more than 1,500 customers had received incorrect information on cheapest tariffs, resulting in more than £13,000 in payments.

Two further issues included recording the incorrect numbers of customers on its priority services register (PSR). Between 2016 and 2019 it failed to remove 854 customers from the PSR. Ofgem said no customer detriment was caused.

Furthermore nine customers’ payments had been allocated to an incorrect account and a total payment of more than £1,600 has been issued.

The total redress comprises:

• Direct customer refunds totalling £809,220.41
• Customer goodwill payments totalling £595,290
• A payment into the Voluntary Redress Fund totalling £95,489.59

Ofgem added that the size of the redress package takes account both the nature of the errors and iSupply’s positive behaviour during the compliance engagement, including the fact it self-reported some of the errors, the remedial actions taken by senior management and its cooperative attitude.

The latest case is not the first time the retailer has been under fire from the regulator. In December 2019 it emerged iSupply was to pay £1.5 million into the voluntary redress fund after breaching the price cap and overcharging customers around £36,000.