British Gas paid me £38,000 in error and I can’t pay it back | Energy bills

British Gas paid me over £38,000 by mistake and then had no idea how to claim it. I receive quarterly feed-in tariff (Fit) payments for the energy exported by my solar panels.

In May, I made a claim for £300, based on my meter reading and received an email stating I was owed £38,611.59.

This sum was paid the next day and remained there for more than seven weeks. Despite calling and writing constantly, there seemed to be no procedure to claim the payment and no one knew what to do.

I knew it was illegal to spend money I wasn’t entitled to, but it was embarrassing to have it in my checking account and I feared some kind of fraud had occurred.

The funds finally left my account a week ago, but I have not been able to establish with British Gas whether they have received them. The scripts given to customer service agents do not cover such an incident. Additionally, I have not yet received the £300 Fit payment I am entitled to.

DTSale

Your unwanted windfall came after news of a £6,800 payment from Yorkshire Water to a bemused customer who, like you, had to cajole the company for weeks to return it.

In that case, an employee had misspelled their bank details when updating their payroll entry, so their salary had been paid twice (without anyone noticing!) to the wrong account.

Their ordeal was also the result of a butter-fingered agent entering the incorrect meter reading, according to British Gas.

What’s extraordinary is that these utility companies, which are so good at going after customer debt, apparently have no process for verifying obviously crazy credit, nor any interest in recovering misdirected funds.

The money arrived in his account on May 14 and was not claimed until July 14. It is a potential crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the Theft Act to fail to report money that was wrongly paid to you. And a company could sue in civil court if it spent what it was so carelessly remitted, so it did the right thing both legally and morally by persevering.

British Gas belatedly realized this and has offered him £500 as compensation for his troubles. He also, two months late, handed in the Fit payment he was actually due, although this time he underestimated it by £2, and had to make noise for what I hope will be the last time.

British Gas ‘missing’ payments

While you were reflecting on British Gas’s spontaneous payoff, another green-minded customer saw his credit rating destroyed when the company pursued him for fabricated debts.

When jg installed a heat pump in his Berkshire home, paid off his gas bill and arranged for British Gas to remove the gas meter. British Gas duly complied and issued a final statement showing a credit of £430, which it refunded.

That was in November 2024. Two months later, JG received the first in a succession of estimated gas bills for supply that no longer existed. JG had to laboriously dispute each one of them.

“In the end, in January of this year, I thought we had finally solved the problem,” he writes. “In March, I received a letter from the bank telling me that they were going to massively reduce my overdraft facility.

“It turned out that British Gas had informed the credit reference agencies that I had missed six payments and that there was a default amount of £833 in my British Gas account.”

The six late payments were eventually removed by British Gas from his credit history after he complained, but the imaginary default of £833 was left for all lenders to see and be alarmed.

“British Gas appears unable to manage a property that no longer has a gas supply,” writes JG.

Only when I intervened did the company discover that it had forgotten to register the disconnected meter in its system and had forgotten to remove the debt marker from JG’s credit record.

He is quite pleased with himself because, on his own and before JG involved the press, he had canceled the £833 note (if not the “default” one on record) and replaced it with a mysterious 32p charge.

Magnanimously, he has now refunded this latter sum and added £150 in goodwill, which JG says is a negligible reflection of the stress, financial damage and many hours of inconvenience the mistake has caused him.