DO NOT refuse to pay your energy bill coming in October. The following is what you can do to engage with and make a stand that will hurt your energy supplier without getting into you debt or damaging your credit rating:
- Cancel your Direct Debit immediately but continue paying what you have been paying each month before the latest price hikes.
- Next write a letter of complaint to your energy supplier. Once your complaint had been raised, your energy supplier can’t take any debt collection action on your account and can’t pass your details to the credit reference agencies. That bill gets put on hold while they attempt to resolve your complaint. Meanwhile keep on paying your regular amount as this could take some considerable time.
The energy company might attempt to resolve the dispute by offering you a small reduction – DON’T accept it. Keep your complaint open and active and hold out.
- Eventually, they will have to send you a letter of ‘Deadlock’ saying they have gone as far as they can with your complaint and can’t go any further. Your only remaining option is to take your complaint up with CRU the energy regulator. Companies that supply electricity or gas (or both) to homes and businesses in Ireland, are licensed to do so by the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU). The CRU role is to protect consumers. If you have a complaint about your energy supplier, and you cannot resolve that complaint with the supplier directly, you can bring the problem to the CRU to investigate. For every complaint the regulator receives, they make a considerable charge to your energy supplier to have it investigated.
- The energy companies have limitations on how many complaints they’re allowed to open as well as a turnaround time of how fast they respond to and resolve a complaint. If they don’t respond to them fast enough and fail to resolve the complaints or have too many complaints open, the energy firm will also get hit with a fine from the CRU.
This is how you hurt and put manners on an energy company. This could also put them in breach of their licensing conditions and jeopardise their ability to trade.
So if you want to fight extortionate energy price hikes
- Raise a complaint
- Keep the complaint active
- Take them to the CRU.
You should submit a GDPR to your energy supplier at the same time as the above actions. The GDPR obliges the energy company to provide you with every piece of information they have on you; including telephone conversation transcripts, past bills, everything! This is time consuming and costly for them to collect and creates a great deal of difficulty and inconvenience for them. However they are legally obliged to comply within one month. You can do the same with the CRU if they try to give you the runaround.
Why the Energy Hike Robbery?
If the price of gas and electricity were really going up at the rates your bills are increasing the energy companies profits would have been hit and would be falling until the prices charged to you their customers were increased. Nothing like that ever happened. Instead the energy company’s profits soared. Despite what you have been told and what is being constantly spun in the corporate media;
- Russia is not responsible for the rocketing energy and fuel prices.
- Neither are the energy companies primarily responsible although they aren’t complaining.
- The government are 100% responsible for the exorbitant energy price hikes through their Commission for Regulation of Utilities(CRU, Irish: An Coimisiúin um Rialáil Fóntais) who set the energy price cap (increase in price hikes.
The government are taking advantage of the Ukraine war hype and the EU’s embargo on Russian fuel to deliberately inflate the fuel costs. If you are wondering why, look up the World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’ where Claus Schwab is telling you “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. Its not so long ago that Micheal Martin and Leo Varadkar were cosying up to him and being told what to do in Davos. You are now paying for that and will continue to do so at an accelerating rate unless you and others take action as suggested above..