Court Decision.

Episode 8: An open letter to our MP, Angus Brendan MacNeil SNP.

 

Dear Angus

I hope this letter finds you well.

Below is an email which one of your constituents (name withheld) shared with me. It was forwarded to you last Saturday in response to your refusal to request OFGEM reopen its Investigation into British Gas’ “refusal” to allow your Stornoway constituents access to it most economical tariff.

 

Dear Mr MacNeil

                             

 Thank you for your belated email. Let me remind you, I am a single mother and I found the years which British Gas refused me access to its Sainsbury's tariff very difficult financially and when I contacted you for help British Gas simply said it "had no record of my having called" and implied I had never made the call - that I was in fact a liar! And your advice is that I contact that same company. Are you serious?

If so, I am disgusted. When I voted for you to represent me last December, I did so in the belief that you would honour your promise to represent your constituents to the utmost of your ability. Is this the utmost of your ability? After being made aware that British Gas - the same company which called many of your constituents liars because (it claims) it could find no record of them having called for a better deal - is now claiming it itself "cannot locate" a document containing unlawful advice? Does that mean British Gas is lying? Surely OFGEM should be required to find out, after all it cited British Gas' inability to "locate evidence" of many of your constituents calling to get the Sainsbury's deal to decide they were all lying!

What is stopping you, the MP for this area, presenting this fact to OFGEM and demanding it reopen its investigation? 

Your refusal means, I am not being represented by my elected Member of Parliament in this matter, and nor are many others and I simply don't understand why. If, for some reason, you have no interest in representing the very people who voted for you, that's simply disgusting and you should immediately resign. I'm sure British Gas would give you a job!

                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                       Yours sincerely…

 

 

This is a very revealing email calling-out, as it does, the consequences of British Gas’ assertion it that could not find any evidence of any of its Stornoway customers having “called” in order to access a tariff, printed on the front page of their bills, which would have reduced their energy costs by as much as 30%. All of those customers, your constituents, according to British Gas, falsely claimed to have made that “call”.

 

Have you forgotten this Angus, or do you simply not care that forty plus of your Stornoway constituents have been dismissed as being dishonest because British Gas could find no record of their having called?

I ask, because there was a time when it concerned you greatly: On September 25^th 2017, at a meeting in your constituency office in Stornoway attended by you and I, your secretary and OFGEM senior officials, Shona Fisher and Antony Pygram, you, with no small degree of passion, pointed out that over forty of your constituents had been told by British Gas that they were ineligible for the Sainsbury’s Energy tariff because “Sainsbury’s Energy does not deliver propane gas to Stornoway”. You then reminded the OFGEM representatives that Sainsbury’s Energy was an abstract entity dreamed-up by British Gas’ Advertising Department and could not, therefore, deliver gas to anywhere. Even before that meeting, you released a “Press Statement” in which you stated your office was “inundated” by complaints from your constituents that British Gas had refused them access to its Sainsbury’s Energy deal. One of those was a struggling single-mother who would have saved over a thousand pounds had she been allowed access to that deal. It was she who forwarded the email to you last Saturday.

 

What has happened to you since then, Angus? I know, of course, OFGEM’s Anthony Pygram wrote to you in December 2017, the day before the Christmas holidays, to advise you that OFGEM had found “no evidence” that British Gas had discriminated against your constituents and that their claims - all of them - to have requested access to the Sainsbury’s deal advertised on the front page of their bills, were in effect, dishonest because “British Gas could find no record of these calls having been made” And although you complained at the time that you had provided ample evidence of British Gas’ having resorted to dishonesty to cover-up its behaviour with regard to your constituents (including a “doctored call-recording”) you ultimately gave-up. Why was that?

 

No matter, the thing about giving-up is this: It doesn’t have to be permanent. You can re-engage Angus; as did that great symbol of Scottish Independence, The Bruce! Which you should. And not only because your constituents are asking you to. Remember, the private company which was so blithe to impugn all of your constituents by implying they must have lied because it could not “locate” any evidence of them having called to request its Sainsbury’s Energy deal, is now, as per the above email, happily declaiming to The Court that it itself cannot “locate” a document it produced around the very time those Stornoway customers were calling for the Sainsbury’s Energy deal. And why wouldn’t it? Because the document in question is of consequential importance perhaps?

 

 It is a document British Gas’ legal representative - the same representative who so shocked your secretary when he apprised The Court that a British Gas Executive Officer was a “junior customer services manager…” - admits was sent, by his client, to Ombudsman Services: Energy. In it, as you know, British Gas makes the assertion that my complaint (that I was refused access to its Sainsbury’s deal) was “not something the Ombudsman can help him [me] with”.  As you also know very well Angus, if this document is unearthed, it will be a very serious matter indeed: Because British Gas, like all energy suppliers has - if it cannot resolve a customer complaint - a statutory duty to advise that customer that s/he should seek  the help of Ombudsman Services: Energy. To issue contrary advice would reveal British Gas to be in the clearest breach of its statutory obligations. So any document, as we discussed all that time ago, prior to the “OFGEM meeting”, containing such advice, would be hugely, and legally, significant.

 

Yet here we are, over two years since OFGEM dismissed your constituents’ claims that they were denied access to the Sainsbury’s deal because "British Gas [was] unable to find any record of any of them having called for that deal”! And now British Gas, is simply thumbing its nose at all requests for it to provide a copy a document that it fabricated around the same time your constituents claim they attempted to access the Sainsbury's deal: It cannot be found and that’s that; it signifies nothing. Unlike the data relating to your constituents’ calls to access a tariff deal which would have saved them up to 30% on their energy bills: that cannot be found either, but that signifies something: the dishonesty of your constituents! Is it any wonder that British Gas is continuing to blatantly discriminate against your constituents based on where the live?

 

What now then, Angus? Will you cleave to the claim that you cannot request OFGEM reopen its Investigation? Because you absolutely can. And you surely must! There is absolutely no law, no regulation and no protocol stopping you. None. And remember this; nothing has changed since you so forcefully assured Antony Pygram that you had “no doubts whatsoever” as to the "honesty” of your constituents. Nothing, that is, except the reliability of the British Gas data retention system which could not “locate any records of their having called”.

 

Let me conclude then, with this adjuration: Represent your constituents, and represent them properly. It’s what you swore an oath to do. It's what you assured us only last December you would do. And it’s what our hard earned taxes pay you to do. On behalf all your constituents, including the many represented by the single-parent who forwarded you the above email - if not your own sense of decency - contact OFGEM to request it reopen an Investigation which you so rightly concluded was wholly inadequate the first time round. And this time, demand it look into the missing “document” advising one of your constituents, contrary to OFGEM’s own statutory regulations, “Ombudsman cannot help”! Independence, Angus, is a personal quality as well as a national goal.

 

Yours, on behalf of all the Stornoway gas customers who were denied access to British Gas’ most economical tariff and whose honesty, unlike British Gas and OFGEM (and their MP?), I absolutely do not question,

 

 

Derek McPherson.