JESSICA BEARD: British Gas is in the gutter… the boss must go

Enough is enough. British Gas HomeCare has been letting down customers for years with its pitiful service.

And you’ve told us the power giant has once again been up to its old tricks this winter – failing families in their hour of need when their boiler has broken down.

Money Mail’s postbag has been groaning with complaints against British Gas and its boiler cover arm. Many are furious that they’ve been left in the cold or unable to book a service for weeks.

Others have had appointments postponed or rescheduled with very little notice. Some engineers just never turn up.

It baffles me quite why so many people (three million at the last count) fork out for HomeCare year after year when it costs around £100 to have your boiler serviced and around £1,200 to replace one.

Woeful performance: Chris O’Shea (pictured) –  chief exec of British Gas’s parent company Centrica – has accepted a £4.5m pay packet 

The cover is getting so expensive that one customer, Eev Rhodes, told us she now faces premiums of £1,089. 

And that’s after an engineer left her with a flooded home. Surely a better plan is to put money you’d have spent on premiums in a rainy-day savings account that pays interest?

Against an embarrassing backdrop of abysmal service and rocketing prices, Chris O’Shea — chief executive of British Gas’s parent company Centrica — has accepted a £4.5 million pay packet, including a whopping £3.7 million bonus. He should be ashamed.

In 2022, British Gas’s HomeCare arm won our annual Wooden Spoon award for shoddy service. At the time, Mr O’Shea agreed to accept the trophy but only on a Zoom video call.

He was dressed casually in a blue hoodie and revealed he was working from home. He contritely voiced his ‘frustrations’ over engineers not turning up.

He was in complete agreement that the service his company provided was unacceptable.

He promised a systems update to help engineers see more customers in a day should be in place by this winter just gone.

Mr O’Shea assured us that he had identified where the issues were and that though he couldn’t fix them overnight, he’d sort them out. 

A year on, and nothing much seems to have changed. Except, that is, for the much higher price tag, Mr O’Shea’s obscene bonus — and a worrying new disregard for customers.

When British Gas won our Wooden Spoon again this January, Mr O’Shea turned down repeated requests to discuss his firm’s woeful service and a spokesman said he was too busy to accept the award.

Yes, the past year has been challenging for power firms as the energy price crisis has raged. But that’s no excuse for refusing to face up to your own failings.

British Gas — once our national energy supplier — should be setting the standard for rivals. Instead, its service is in the gutter. Perhaps it’s time it was stripped of the ‘British’ in its name. British Gas? More like Broken Gas.

As for Mr O’Shea, I’m afraid he’s now had every chance to turn the ship around — and failed. He should hand back his bumper bonus and resign.

Don’t be a savings fool…

Week in, week out, Money Mail is full of warnings about the tricks banks play to keep you earning miserly returns on your savings.

Our savings guru Sylvia Morris says the banks are setting more and more traps.

Last week I was targeted by a common ploy. NatWest sent me a celebratory text announcing an increase in interest rates on my Savings Builder account, up to 2.02 per cent. But that’s way off pace.

Small rival banks pay as much as 3.26 per cent now on easy-access deals. That’s more than 60 per cent better than NatWest’s deal. 

Celebratory text? Pull the other one. As interest rates rise, there is no excuse for standing still on a poor-paying deal. Don’t be the savings fool this April.

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This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk