Hi Bankfodder - don't worry about offending - I completely understand and appreciate the advice that I am receiving. I am in 12 hour a day job and have to go to Bath this evening to work on a flat that has just been trashed by tenants - absolutely no sympathy vote, just a brief explanation of my circumstances. I am now weighing up driving to the midlands on Sunday afternoon to collect the necessary paperwork or go to work in the evening to download what I have here (I don't have a scanner at my flat) I have discovered the letter of complaint to the ombudsman which summarises the situation (in dads words) from the beginning. Either way I really regret until Sunday I am not going to be able to reply any more than on a mobile telephone. I will be making a donation towards the running of the site - I appreciate the site doesn't run on nothing. J

p.s. I don't have the final response from npower you asked fro bankfodder. He says he hasn't received on but I will go through the paperwork at home early next week to make sue. J

This is from the ombudsman late last year - interestingly they 'I have identified no reason to doubt that the company has issued at least one accurate bill every 12 months; therefore my view is that the Code does not apply' which seems to contradict their admission in their more recent correspondence that I posted on the previous page. I will try and discover more about the original bill from the paperwork I have this evening. Thanks again. J

Evening all, Thank you for the assistance Malc - I have just tried to PM you but because I haven't yet racked up 30 messages I can't If you could drop me one I will respond by email or text - however you wish. I have just received a load of information. Unfortunately I don't have the complaint to the ombudsman, but I have a response from the first complaint to them. Only have by email so another pasted link I regret. Before that though I have this correspondence from npower going back to '13 - I think it illustrates how this bigger bill from the staywarm days is being tagged onto the current account. With reference to the receipts - they are available. All of the correspondence at the time was being copied into the local MP - fat help that was!

Hi Bankfodder - I'm on the case now. The second I have it - you will too. Cheers, J

Thank you Batman and Bankfodder. I'm not sure exactly what a DSAR is but I am going to speak to my father tomorrow. I have just re-read the ombudsman's response and while it admits there were serious issues with the way npower were issuing bills, there is no clarity on the main issue - where the £5-8,000 came from? I will try and find out more about how they were calculating the bills.... picking through what I have now! J

Hi all - okay this is what I have so far. Apologies I have pasted and copied but the response was sent by email so there are no hard copies that I have seen. I have just read through it and still don't quite understand why it doesn't seem to address the root problem of this sum of money that appeared? As I said the figure they want to settle it literally always different. Anyway here goes...... Bankfodder - my parents are out of the country right now but I am home on Monday eve/Tuesday where I can take the SAR and fish through it in detail. Good work Batman! Yes - that is it the TUX scheme. I am going to have a look through the paperwork I have here in London this evening to see if there is anything else that maybe helpful, but in the meantime here is the paperwork for the Staywarm Scheme. J I think this has worked..... J Why is it that npower did not accept it was a contract? And why is it that you say that it has now been proved that it is a contract? What does that mean? I'm really not sure why npower did not accept this as a contract, but in the relatively early days he went up to I think Stafford where npower has a base to speak to a 'customer representative' face to face who swore blind that he had no contract with Staywarm. It was then proven it was (source unknown). I will message them tonight an try and get some more info about this.... Thanks you all so much. J Staywarm.pdf

Sorry Bankfodder - I must have not been paying attention - my apologies. Also, I don't quite understand. You seem to be saying that you have had the npower disclosure since summer of last year and yet it seems you still haven't gone through it all. Is this correct - Correct, it has become more apparent that this is getting totally ontop of him and he's now so immersed in the small detail he can no longer see the wood for the trees. To be honest this is probably how it has gone on for so long; there is so much detail i am still uncovering. I have a pretty hectic job but have now realized its just not going to get resolved unless I try and deal with it (this dawned on me about two weeks ago) He is in the midlands - I am in London. You say that your father has been making all the payments but simply they haven't been credited to the npower account because they were being paid to StayWarm. Is that correct? Correct, at the same time it seems npower were billing him concurrently. Do you have the evidence of the payments which were made to StayWarm? Not yet - I will ask him tonight. I have a signed contract for staywarm. When presented to npower in the early days they denied it was a contract - it has since been proven that is in fact is. Finally, we are very anxious to help you here – especially against npower but it is rather difficult if you don't monitor the forum and you allow four days to elapse between each visit and each response. I am incredibly grateful for the information I am receiving, thank you all - unfortunately I was off line this weekend. Now and for the foreseeable fully online J

Thanks all - the back billing issue is interesting and worth consideration. In the meantime I can attach the ombudsmans 'ruling' shortly. J ps how do I attach an image?

Hi everybody, Many thanks for your help so far - really helpful so see a different perspective on this. The letter of apology and £150 compensation ordered by the ombudsman is strange , I agree Bankfodder. I assume it is some kind of acknowledgement that NPower have dealt with the matter badly but it does seem incredibly contradictory. The SAR is dated from the Summer '15 and the paperwork is impressive - I think the postage bill alone was about £20! There is just so much paperwork its going to take me some time to go through it but such is my fathers health and stress regarding the whole situation I feel I must step in and try to deal with this once and for all. However the elephant in the room is that there is no paperwork regarding where the initial bill for circa £5,000 was generated from (way back in '03 ish), and that is what I realize I have to get to the heart of and the fact that every one of the substantial number of demands from NPower is always for a wildly varying sum of money... The ombudsman has come back and notified us that I'm going to have to start thinking on my feet and acting fast... Funnily enough, when I represented him during this summer regarding one of his court requests for non-payment and bailiff threats to enter the house (which was retracted the second I arrived as this was a 'dispute' and not an issue over the non-payment of a bill, so I was told by the freelancer who was representing NPower) she also told me that she has never seen a case where a judge has ruled in favour of NPower when similar parties to me have taken the fight to NPower - but then I realize that without more detailed knowledge I could be playing with fire... Thanks UncleBulgaria - I'm off to investigate the ICO. Regards, John

Hi all, I’m really hoping that one of you may be able to help me? I’m going to try and cut a very long story short so here we go with the salient points. Back in 2001 (yes, 2001!) my father who was over 60 applied for a TXU StayWarm account which I believe was government backed and enabled users electricity and gas for a flat fee of £53.20 per month. At this time he had an NPower (or their alias back then) account and notified them he would now be moving onto StayWarm and leaving NPower – I have a signed contract between him and StayWarm dated 2001. NPower, despite being told he was switching providers never released his account to StayWarm. The first he knew about a problem was correspondence that he wasn’t paying his gas bill and a demand for a sum of approximately £5,000*18months later. This is when their endless and relentless pursuit of him began for this ‘debt’. It appears that they failed to cancel his account and were misguidedly billing him for energy use. He has never received the money back that he was paying during this time to StayWarm and now, despite paying his monthly payments (StayWarm was stopped shortly after these problems began – hence back to NPower) there is a ‘debt’ hanging over him. *Since then there have been over 55 separate demands for a sum of money between about £5,000 and £8,000 although the number is never the same (ie Jan ’09 £8,182.63 and March ’10 £5,899.95) Numerous letters from the bailiff threatening a warrant to enter his home and he should attend the magistrates court on a certain date. I attended during this summer and it was made clear that these should never have been issued because it was a ‘dispute’ over a sum of money and there was no question that he wasn’t paying his bills. Recent claims that there were two gas metres in the house; I have checked and there is only one. Customer services are useless and at times aggressive He pursued the case with a solicitor in about 2011 but once the solicitor bill got to just over £1,000 couldn’t afford any more money to pay them. Despite the fact he pays monthly over the post office counter (with receipts to prove) they claim in correspondence that he isn’t paying his current bills, and then when challenged are forced to admit that infact he is... Unfortunately this is really affecting him and his levels of stress; and the whole family. How it has been going on for so long I just don’t know, but I am now having to deal with it because I am genuinely worried it will affect his health (as you can imagine he is of a certain age). He applied for an SAR during the Summer but the NPower records only go back to 2008 so they have no proof or evidence where or what this bill is for. In among the huge file of paperwork is however multiple references to *Please do not inform the customer of any potential writeoff* He has been to the ombudsman and despite the lack of evidence from NPower (no records before ’08) have sided with them and summarized that they should write him a letter of apology and give him £150! What do I do? How can I get them off our backs? Many thanks in advance. John.