Energy: gathering momentum

By Richard North - February 4, 2023

Although we’ve had sporadic media pieces on the prepayment meter scam, I don’t think we’ve ever experienced the intensity of coverage that we’re seeing now, with The Times in its third consecutive day of coverage.

One interesting development is that the paper has picked up on the German Bertelsmann link, pointing out how Liz Mohn, the fabulously rich matriarch of the largest media group in Europe – making €2.31 billion (£2.06 billion) in 2021 – is, in effect, presiding over the activities of Arvato Financial Solutions, “stealing” bread from the mouths of impoverished British single mums.

The story has even found its way into the local German press covering the group’s headquarters town of Gütersloh, in Westphalia, retailing the unhelpful claim that “An Arvato subsidiary is said to have been involved in prepayment systems being installed with the help of burglaries in private homes”.

Although legitimised by the slender cover of a magistrate’s warrant, a “burglary” was exactly how Charlene Eastwood – the subject of yesterday’s investigation in The Times – described a visitation from Mrs Mohn’s goon squad.

She had come home one day in October last year to find dirt trailed through her front room and clothes on the floor, and assumed that someone had broken in. “I thought I had been burgled,” she told the paper. “I was literally crying down the phone to my dad”.

But, as the single mother discovered shortly afterwards, she had been targeted by debt collectors used by British Gas – described by Martin Rowson in his Guardian cartoon as “British Crass”.

The dregs had installed a prepayment meter for her electricity, leaving Eastwood to find “the warrant letter saying they had been in”, on her kitchen side. She had “checked underneath the stairs where they had put this new meter in and wires were absolutely everywhere”.

In news which must have delighted Liz Mohn with the diligence of her Arvato storm troopers, Eastwood, 41, is a self-employed cleaner who lives with her two children, aged 16 and 20. The elder boy has epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome and ADHD. She was concerned about what could have happened if he had been home.

In another stunning success for Mrs Mohn’s thugs, three “burly men” broke into the home of Emma Docherty, 45, from Durham, to install a prepayment meter – even though she was not a British Crass customer. She and her husband were living elsewhere in the building when she saw them leaving a section they rented out as flats. The couple learnt that the goon squad, which had obtained a warrant from a compliant magistrate, had gone to the wrong property.

Clambering on the growing bandwagon with similar stories is the Mirror which has a “mum-of-four” recalling how she returned from a hospital appointment to find a prepayment gas meter installed in her home – despite her being a vulnerable customer.

Jaki Whyte, 41, from Colchester, had arrived home in November 2021 to find the meter door “ripped off” and a note posted through her letter box telling her to call British Crass. She said: “I was in absolute hysterics, I didn’t even know how to top up a prepayment meter”.

Jaki, we are told, has 11 diagnosed disabilities and mental health conditions, which include Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, autism, and arthritis, and has been on the Priority Services Register for over ten years.

However, while Bertelsmann provides the muscle to keep the plebs in their place, it cannot be wholly blamed for the machinations of British Crass, described as cruel, callous and vicious by Grant Shapps in The Times.

Sky News picks up the story, relying on a whistle-blower to expose the “pressure” on British Gas’s debt recovery team to force the installation of prepayment energy meters on customers in debt.

The employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he had seen an increase in the number of indebted customers since the cost of living crisis began, and that debt recovery had become the “be all and end all”.

“My role is predominantly trying to get the most out of that debt collection process. And you know, within the last 18 months, the main focus of that has been the force-fitting of prepayment meters into customers’ homes”, he said, adding: “A lot of pressure is put on that side of the business to collect more debt, to fit more meters. A lot of time is spent figuring out why, if we haven’t been able to fit a meter, why and what we can do better”.

The whistle-blower concedes that, “A lot of the time these customers that you speak to, they physically can’t pay. They don’t have any money. They can’t afford their energy. It is not about them not wanting to pay, they can’t pay”.

But a reason for the source of the pressure comes in another Sky News piece which cites “industry sources” say the collective debt book of the retail energy industry is thought to run to around £2.5 billion – around £2 billion of which is considered bad debt (i.e., irrecoverable).

Meanwhile, with an unexpected angle comes the BBC offering a report from a former magistrate who says he has quit after being left unable to check vulnerable people were being protected when utilities sought warrants to force-fit prepayment meters.

This is Robin Cantrill-Fenwick, who said changes to the court system meant magistrates “were doing nothing more than rubber stamping” warrants. He claims that the lack of scrutiny is putting vulnerable households at risk.

“When I started (as a magistrate), he says, “the energy companies would come to court, and we would be able to question the applicant. We could establish whether there might be young children in the premises or people who were clinically vulnerable. We could, and would sometimes, decline a warrant” – a claim supported by The Justice of the Peace Blog.

However, in 2019, a new online and telephone application system for magistrates came into force, initiated by the Ministry of Justice. And while the number of warrant applications jumped the number of refusals plunged. That year, warrant applications reached 278,966 and 1,824 refusals were granted, In 2022, applications for warrants hit 367,140 and there were just 56 refusals.

“Over time the process changed. Rather than looking at individual applications, we would just get a list of addresses”, Cantrill-Fenwick complained. “The person applying on behalf of the energy company would read out a template statement saying: ‘we’ve done our job’ and there was nothing we could do”.

This builds on work done by Dean Kirby, for iNews with two pieces, one on 21 January and the other yesterday, the latter having “magistrates granting energy firms prepayment meter warrants in ‘private back rooms’ at court”.

Reflecting my observations yesterday, Kirby cites a lawyer who suggests that the procedures adopted could breach human rights legislation, while an apologist from the Magistrates’ Association agrees that, “There may be a case for reviewing the law that pertains to this process”, requiring intervention from parliament.

That puts this issue firmly in political territory, with the Peter Brooke cartoon in The Times brutally making that point, leaving the paper to continue with its third day of reporting.

If previous articles have been uncomfortable for British Crass, this latest report has shown about the same level of mercy to the company that it shows to its consumers. Headed, “British Gas cut off homes when it couldn’t connect prepay meters”, it has the company and Mrs Mohn’s goons breaking every imaginable Ofgem guideline.

The paper cites an Arvato manager who claims that the supplier only started disconnecting these families in recent years, and that each visit had to be pre-approved by a senior staff member at British Gas. “We’ve been doing that for about five or six years now – the disconnection visits on domestic. Never used to touch them”, he said.

We are also treated to the detail of how Arvato personnel fudged their quality assessment procedures to make it look as if they were following procedures – strong evidence that they knew full well that they were crossing the line. That is another thing for Mrs Mohn to ponder.

But Arvato Financial Solutions says it has acted in accordance with regulatory requirements at all times and that The Times findings “did not represent the company’s views or its official guidance on how to interact with customers”.

So that’s alright then. We can all go home to our prepayment meters and freeze when the money runs out, consoled by the thought that corporate gobspeak is an international constant.