I own a guesthouse in Cambridge and my gas bills are typically about £300 a month, which I pay by direct debit, so I was shocked when my supplier, Pozitive Energy, took £61,520 from my account for one month of gas. This left me £55,000 overdrawn.

This happened in May and I tried calling Pozitive but I was on hold for hours and got no response. Worried about being so overdrawn, I asked my bank to reverse the payment and cancel the direct debit, which it did.

Since then I have emailed and phoned Pozitive to ask it to resolve my billing issue, but it has been a month and I’ve heard nothing from the company except two emails confirming that it has received my complaint. I have received two threatening letters, the first demanding that I pay the £61,520 bill and the second telling me that my gas supply could be disconnected if I don’t. This is ridiculous when the company has severely overcharged me and seems to be ignoring me. Ladislav Wilson, Cambridge

Troubleshooter says

That’s an obscene amount to charge for a month of gas. Your story is familiar — earlier this year I helped a reader who was trying to get Pozitive to refund £23,600 that it had charged for two months of energy.

Pozitive’s billing system is automatic, but it’s worrying that it fails to flag abnormal increases in bills and get them checked by a human before taking such a vast sum of money from customers.

Once I got involved, Pozitive reassured you that you wouldn’t be disconnected while it investigated. It took a few days for it to realise that the problem came about after a new smart meter was fitted at your property in March last year. It said it hadn’t received information about the new meter so its billing system hadn’t been updated. But it wouldn’t explain what information was missing and why it took a year for this problem to emerge.

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When I checked your bills it became clear that after the meter was installed it wasn’t automatically sending readings to Pozitive, which meant that your bills had been based on estimates for a year. You had assumed the smart meter was working as it should and hadn’t noticed the letter E for estimate next to the readings in your bills. In March Pozitive had given an estimated reading of 33352, but in April your meter sent an actual reading of 4429. Pozitive wouldn’t explain what triggered it to start getting your actual readings.

The new meter was set at zero, so when Pozitive got a real reading in April, it thought your meter had peaked at 99999 and reset before rising to 4429, which is why it thought you had used far more gas than you had. It has cancelled the £61,520 bill.

Pozitive said: “We have thoroughly investigated the situation and the invoices have been corrected. We are now receiving readings from the smart meter, and we anticipate no further issues moving forward. We will continue working directly with the customer to ensure their satisfaction and address any further concerns.”

But that wasn’t the end of it because the company then sent you 33 bills totalling £8,481 which it said were payable by June 21. I asked Pozitive why you had received these but it wouldn’t answer my question.

It has now cancelled those mysterious bills and recalculated them based on your real readings. It realised it had overestimated your bills during that year, so you are now in credit by £3,150 which it has refunded.

I asked Pozitive about compensating you for the stress this had caused, but again it wouldn’t give me an answer.

You said this had been a rollercoaster and you were disappointed that it hadn’t offered compensation. Let’s hope it does the right thing eventually.

My father is 96 and has had dementia for about 20 years after a series of strokes. I have had power of attorney over his finances and property since 2009. For many years he lived in his house and had private nurses visiting him three times a day, but last year he moved into a nursing home near me.

When I was sorting out his house I went through his bank statements and discovered that he had been paying both TalkTalk and Utility Warehouse for landline and broadband services for the past 15 years. My dad wasn’t fully aware of what was happening with his finances so I don’t think he would have realised.

In January I phoned both companies to cancel the contracts. I pointed out that my father wouldn’t have used his broadband service and that he didn’t even have a computer. TalkTalk asked me to return the modem but I said he didn’t have one. TalkTalk has been charging about £35 a month while Utility Warehouse has been charging £21, so my father will have paid thousands of pounds in error.

I complained to both companies but it has been three months and they now seem to be ignoring me. I think it’s unreasonable that they can charge for the same service and I would expect one of them to reimburse my dad. Name and address supplied

Troubleshooter says

When you first called the companies, they were limited in what they could tell you because you hadn’t yet sent your power of attorney documents to prove that you had the right to manage your dad’s finances. Once you provided these they cancelled the contracts but you were still in the dark about what services they had provided.

After I called both companies it turned out that they were actually providing different services to your dad: Utility Warehouse was his landline provider and TalkTalk supplied his broadband. But you said he hadn’t used his broadband service for more than a decade and didn’t even have a modem so you wanted TalkTalk to refund his bills. TalkTalk believed he had all the equipment he needed to have a broadband connection in his home so it’s not clear what happened to the modem.

I asked TalkTalk when your father last used his broadband service and, while its records only date back to 2021, it confirmed that he hadn’t used it since then. It doesn’t check whether customers are using their service. It said it had sent your dad emails about his bills and, when I pointed out that he was a vulnerable customer, it said it wasn’t aware of this until January when you first got in touch. It said its service is based on availability rather than use — in other words, its service had been available to your father and it wasn’t to blame for him not using it.

TalkTalk said: “We empathise with this situation and are saddened to learn about the confusion regarding the broadband package.”

It would refund only January’s bill of £34.50 and waive a £12.50 fee, which it had charged because you had cancelled the direct debit before the final February payment had been made.

I was sorry that I couldn’t do more to help, but as your father’s attorney, I do think you might have checked his bills and bank statements when you knew he was losing mental capacity because this problem might have come to light a lot sooner.

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