Energy Ombudsman
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Personal claims not worth persuing as Ombudsman is clearly toothless
I found my experience with the Ombudsman incredibly frustrating after I had a 9-month dispute with Octopus Energy. There was a fire in my building, the power supply was cut off and won't be back on for at least 2 years. Despite this fact, Octopus accepted there was no power in the building but erroneously insisted that I continue to pay standing charges and they created estimated bills because they couldn't stop charges. Here started a 6-month ordeal with Octopus where they twice sent my details to debt collection agencies, gave me conflicting advice, opened accounts without asking, broke GDPR regulations and didn't once hit an agreed deadline. This significantly affected my mental health in what has been categorically the worst year of my life. I decided to take them to the ombudsman so that they would change their future practices and provide me with adequate compensation. At the end of a further 8-week process, the ombudsman found everything in my favour. However, they stated they couldn't make companies change their practices, couldn't investigate GDPR complaints, couldn't make companies remove charges and ultimately offered me less than 50% of the final offer from Octopus Energy. When I questioned why they couldn't give me at least what Octopus were already willing to give me, they stated that they could only award amounts in line with similar claims. This is despite their remit to award up to £10,000 in compensation and my ask was less than 10% of that. This has left me feeling that the Ombudsman isn't on the side of the consumer, it should be heavily punishing these energy companies but ultimately sides with them for arbitrary reasons. My advice to anyone pursuing personal compensation via the Ombudsman is to not bother. Take the final offer given to you by the Energy company and move on.