British Gas has been hit with a £9.5m penalty for billing and complaints failures by regulator Ofgem.
Tens of thousands of business customers received inaccurate and late bills following the supplier implementing a new billing system in 2014. British Gas also failed to adequately handle the resulting wave of complaints, said Ofgem.
British Gas acknowledged the problem in December 2014. Two-years later, Ofgem has struck a deal with the supplier that will see micro-businesses receiving some of the redress payment, with the remainder going to the Money Advice Trust charity.
“We invested in a new billing system so we could improve the service we provide to our business customers. At the time, this was a major undertaking – merging nearly 100 different systems into one. It didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked so we reported this to Ofgem as a priority,” said Gab Barbaro, managing director of British Gas Business.
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