Hundreds of customers say they are being bamboozled by their bills from one of the UK’s largest energy firms, with many claiming they are being charged hundreds or even thousands of pounds more than they believe they owe.
Last month, we wrote about a woman who couldn’t understand her bills from Ovo Energy.
She was previously supplied by SSE Energy Services, but was transferred to Ovo after it bought the former firm in 2020 – and that was where her problems started.
She used to pay around £250 every three months to SSE, and owed it nothing at the time of the switch.
Bonkers bills: Around 200 Ovo customers told us they thought they had been wrongly charged
She was shocked to find her first Ovo bill had set her a monthly direct debit of £186 – as well as telling her she was almost £600 in debt.
The situation had got so bad that the pensioner said she was extremely anxious and only cooking ‘one small meal a day’ in order to try and keep her bills from spiralling.
Within minutes of publishing the story, emails started flooding in from Ovo customers who also found their bills mind-boggling. Within a week, we had been contacted by more than 200 people – all with a similar story.
Some showed us their bills, and in many cases we thought the calculations didn’t add up.
Have you experienced problems with Ovo? Email [email protected]
Ovo has already been fined for getting bills wrong. Last month, regulator Ofgem forced it to correct 11,000 customers’ bills, and pay them an average of £181 each in compensation, because they were overcharged between October 2022 and March 2023.
The overwhelming response from our readers, the majority of whom reported issues that had continued post-March 2023, suggests this could be the tip of the iceberg.
Many said that they were hundreds of pounds in credit with SSE – but as soon as the switchover to Ovo happened, that was snatched away and they were told they were now in debt.
Others saw their monthly direct debit payments hiked by hundreds of pounds per month, with one describing his bills as a ‘terrifying’ and like a ‘runaway train’.
Some had ‘balance adjustments’ of hundreds or even thousands of pounds, without an explanation of what these were for. One told us her usual monthly bill of £150 had been ratcheted up to £3,600 for one month alone.
We approached Ovo with a dossier of more than 120 people’s complaints.
We asked the firm what was going on – and what it was going to do about it.
Who are Ovo energy?
Ovo boss, Stephen Fitzpatrick
The Bristol-based firm was founded in 2009 and is the third-biggest energy company in the UK, after it snapped up larger rival SSE in January 2020.
Overnight, it went from being a relatively small supplier with hundreds of thousands of customers, to being one of the ‘big six’ and the energy provider for around 5million British homes.
At the time of the acquisition, it reassured SSE customers in a statement that ‘although the business is now owned by Ovo, their payments and tariff won’t change.’
In Citizens’ Advice’s latest customer service survey, published in July 2022, Ovo was deemed to be the second-worst in the UK after Utilita.
Ovo is headed up by Stephen Fitzpatrick, a former City trader who runs businesses through a parent company, Imagination Industries.
The firm also owns a flying taxi company called Vertical Aerospace, as well as the Kensington Roof Gardens party venue in London. The Sunday Times Rich List 2023 claimed Fitzpatrick was worth £2.2 billion.
Lynn Fraser, 67, a council administrator from Nottinghamshire, was one such customer, having been told at one point that her two-bed terraced property was forecast to rack up an eye-watering £166,000 in bills over a year.
Lynn is the landlord of a rented house, which is on a pay-as-you-go meter. After a tenant moved out in November last year, she spent some time redecorating and changed the energy supply into her own name for the period that the property would be empty.
Fast-forward to March 2023 and Lynn received a bill saying she owed an extra £962 – for a single day of energy use. Based on that level of use, the letter said, the estimated bill for the next 12 months would be £166,000.
‘I initially thought the charge must be for an outstanding payment from the previous tenant, but was assured that it was for one day while I had been renovating,’ she said.
Lynn’s story also highlighted issues with Ovo’s call centre staff.
One day in particular both my partner and I were in tears after being on the phone and chat line for six hours before getting cut off
Many of the readers who contacted us felt that the service was sub-par, reporting long waits on the phone and being hung up on.
Some went further, reporting that certain staff members they spoke to were rude and even threatening.
‘My partner tried to explain to the call handler that nobody uses that amount of gas in one day unless they are running a huge industrial plant, but we were told this was the reading and we would have to pay it,’ Lynn says.
‘One day in particular both my partner and I were in tears after being on the phone and chat line for six hours before getting cut off.’
After weeks of trying to make the firm see sense, Lynn received a final demand for around £950 in late May – with the threat of debt collectors if she didn’t pay.
But since we contacted Ovo, the bill was recalculated to just £96, a balance that the firm agreed to clear. ‘I am just relieved that it has been sorted and I will never be using Ovo in future,’ she said. Ovo said this case was unrelated to the switch from SSE.
Teleri James, 54, a university department head from Carmarthenshire in Wales, had been in credit with SSE, but within months of the Ovo switchover a balance adjustment of £2,684 had been added to her account, plunging her into debt.
She first noticed the adjustment in January 2023 and submitted an official complaint in March, but the situation was not resolved until This is Money contacted Ovo about her case.
Worry: Some Ovo customers have told us the billing problems they experienced left them in significant distress (stock image, posed by model)
‘I get passed from pillar to post all the time, you are told it has been referred to the resolutions department and then it’s been referred somewhere else,’ she says.
‘I spoke to someone and they said they would speak to their manager, but then the call went off. I called back, and the same thing happened again. I wondered, is this deliberate, are they doing this because they can’t be bothered to sort this out?
‘I explained to them I wasn’t sleeping. I have some serious health conditions, and having all this stress trying to deal with it, hanging on the phone for ages, I just felt completely at their mercy.
‘It is a huge sum of money to potentially lose. If we had spent that sum of money then so be it, but our bills are reasonable and we have made efforts to reduce them. Everything was fine for 14 months and this just popped up completely out of the blue.’
Since we contacted Ovo, Mrs James’ account balance has been amended to £897 in credit.
Given the issues they experienced with the firm, lots of customers told us they wanted to switch to a different supplier – but they couldn’t do so until their debt to Ovo was paid.
‘We borrowed £3,000 to pay a bill we didn’t even owe’
Mum and daughter Jenny Phipps, 63, a pharmacy counter assistant, and Emma Phipps, 24, a student, from Harrow, London were forced to borrow money from family to pay off a £3,000 Ovo bill, so that they could switch away.
It has since emerged that the bill was hugely inflated.
‘The charges go right back to when Ovo took over from SSE in the middle of October last year, but I didn’t realise what was going on at first,’ Mrs Phipps explains.
The bills suggested that our energy use had quadrupled, and we were told our direct debit would be put up to £867 per month
‘It was only in May when we submitted meter readings that we realised they had tried to charge us an extra £4,000. The bills suggested that our energy use had quadrupled, and we were told our direct debit would be put up to £867 per month to cover the supposed extra usage.’
Ovo told us that this was due to most of the charges for that period being based on estimated meter readings.
‘We tried the next day to talk to Ovo on live chat. They were not helpful, they were quite rude and sarcastic. One person said they would talk to Experian and report us for outstanding debt,’ Jenny continues.
‘A few days later we were called by an operator who said the readings were correct and that our usage really had gone up by that much. I tried to explain that we were just two women living in a small semi, but he didn’t really listen or let me speak. He used tactics of trying to blame me and his tone was quite aggressive.’
Later, Ovo did recalculate the debt – but it was only reduced from around £4,000 to around £3,000.
‘Quite rude’: Several customers we spoke to reported poor service from some of the staff in Ovo’s call centre (stock image, posed by model)
‘I didn’t accept it at first because I still didn’t think we owed them that money,’ Jenny said. ‘But they scared us by saying that they could put our direct debit up to nearly £900 and trash our credit rating.
‘We ended up borrowing the money to pay off the £3,000, which we needed to do to change supplier. Ovo is now saying that was a mistake and it will pay us that money back.’
Emma has also spoken to Ovo on the phone to try and sort this out. ‘I think they are trying to confuse people, they are taking your money but they won’t explain why and you have no option about it,’ she said. ‘They railroad you on the phone and it makes you feel as if you are the one going crazy.’
Since we contacted Ovo, the Phipps have received a cheque for the full amount owed to them, totalling £3,960. However, it took several weeks for this to happen, and the balance of their online account kept changing during this time.
The replies we received also raised concerns about Ovo’s treatment of older and vulnerable customers.
A couple where the husband suffers from chronic heart failure and is reliant on an oxygen tank said they were taking money from their savings just to pay their energy bills, after their monthly direct debit was increased from £230 to £600.
And a customer in her 30s who is severely disabled told us she had seen her monthly bill triple. She had been on a cheaper tariff offered by SSE for people in situations like hers, and when she approached Ovo to ask for a similar deal she was simply told to find another supplier – but she couldn’t afford the fees to exit her current contract.
Elderly customers said they were pushed into paying monthly by direct debit, rather than receiving quarterly bills and paying over the phone.
This is Money also reported our findings to the energy watchdog, Ofgem.
A spokesman said: ‘Protecting customers is always our top priority. There’s a cost-of-living crisis and energy suppliers are always expected to treat customers fairly, repaying any overcharged amounts.
‘We are already speaking to Ovo following our recent market compliance review into customer service. We can’t provide a running commentary, but we publish the results of our market compliance reviews so customers can see what we’re telling energy suppliers to do to improve.’
Its latest review in February found ‘moderate weaknesses’ in Ovo’s customer service, along with several other energy firms, and Ofgem said it was already working with the firm to address these.
