If you think you’ve had a bad experience with your energy supplier, spare a thought for Helen Kane*. Because of E.ON, the 43-year-old has a county court judgment (CCJ) on her credit file, which means she is unable to switch lenders, adding an extra £2,400 a year to her mortgage payments.
Last week her bank cancelled her overdraft without warning, and she is facing a £2,000-plus bill for legal fees. All this because the energy company went to court without telling her, over a debt that had nothing to do with her.
Her case – one of worst seen by Guardian Money in a long time – reveals the cavalier way that some energy firms are taking legal action against customers, often without carrying out proper checks into whether they have the right person. It also shows what a nightmare it can be financially and emotionally if this happens to you, and how little redress there is for victims.
Solicitors have told Guardian Money that delays in the court system mean it is currently taking six to nine months to get a falsely applied CCJ set aside, meaning Kane faces many more months before her life can get back to normal.
The mother, who lives near Ipswich in Suffolk, says her case goes back to January 2022, when tenants at a flat she owns alerted her to a bill that had arrived in her name from E.ON. She knew it had to be a mistake as all existing bills were paid up. She and her husband are only renting the flat out because they couldn’t sell it because of its cladding, and needed a bigger place to house them and their five-year-old son.
When she made what would turn out to be the first of many calls to E.ON to explain that this couldn’t possibly be anything to do with her, she says she was simply ignored. When the bills kept coming in her name and a debt collector got involved, she took the matter to the Energy Ombudsman. After several months, its staff ordered E.ON to investigate the meter issue.
“The company turned up at the flat but because they hadn’t given me any notice there was no one there. I repeatedly gave alternative dates for the investigation to be undertaken to which E.ON simply did not respond,” she says. The toll the matter has taken is clear in her voice.
But instead of investigating properly, last autumn E.ON started pursuing the debt in the courts. And the worst bit of all? Rather than writing to tell her it was happening and giving her a chance to defend herself, the court summons were sent to the flat rather than the contact address she had supplied it with, and the CCJ was applied by the court in her absence. The CCJ was for a debt of £900 (although E.ON has continued to send bills since then and most recent bill was for more than £3,000).
The matter only came to light when she was handed her post by the tenant. The true ramifications of E.ON’s actions emerged in June when she was applying for a new mortgage. Her broker was unable to find a new lender willing to take them on. It resulted in the family having to take a two-year deal with their existing provider that cost £200 a month more than they could have got by going elsewhere.
“I have had to employ a solicitor to get the CCJ set aside, and six months on I am still waiting for it to go back to the courts to get it removed from my credit file,” she says. “My legal bill is expected to exceed £2,000 but E.ON has only offered to pay £1,200.
“I have spent hundreds of hours on the phone, writing letters and so on, all because the staff at E.ON couldn’t be bothered to do their job properly. To take me to court without informing me is unbelievable, given they had all my contact details. I can’t tell you how frustrated and angry I am.”
Kane is not the only person to be on the receiving end of E.ON’s service failures. In June, the energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, ordered the firm to pay £5m in compensation to more than 500,000 customers for “unacceptable” call services.
Only after the Guardian got involved did E.ON do a proper examination of the bill. It emerged that the debt was owed by a company that had gone bust, and someone keying in the details had mistyped the entry and mistakenly assigned it to her flat’s address.
An E.ON spokesperson said: “This is a complex case and we are sorry for the issues experienced by Ms Kane. We contacted the courts to request that the CCJ was removed in January and provided them with further information in early April. We expect confirmation from them that the CCJ has been removed by the end of June. We continue to speak to Ms Kane to reassure her that we will resolve this situation as soon as we can, including ensuring she is not out of pocket for any extra expenses and with appropriate compensation for her experience.”
James Jones from the credit reference firm Experian says the impact of having a CCJ on your credit file can be devastating, and he is not surprised that her bank withdrew her overdraft. In situations such as this, he suggests the individual add a “notice of correction” to their credit report, which is a short statement that explains the history of an entry. Any lender checking it will see this notice and should take it into account when assessing your creditworthiness.
“She should add a notice of correction to her file for now but she really needs to get this [CCJ] removed,” Jones says. “Only once this is done will lenders start dealing with her again as before.”
Anna Curtis, a dispute resolution solicitor at the Dorset-based firm Frettens and an expert on getting CCJs removed, says she has seen a big increase in cases such as Kane’s in recent years.
“We get a large number of inquiries in relation to CCJ issues, most regularly where people have moved house and not properly updated their address details. The situation your reader has found herself in has unfortunately been compounded by the current backlog at the courts. It is taking six to nine months to get these wrongly applied CCJs set aside.
“I would suggest that she may want to explore with her solicitor what other damages she can recover in addition to the judgment being set aside. I really sympathise with her.”
* Helen Kane is not her real name
