Panicked EDF customers today revealed they are now too scared to put the heating on after a ‘system error’ caused energy bills to soar to eyewatering sums of money.
Those affected included an NHS doctor whose holiday was ruined by a shock 1,000 per cent increase, and a customer who was blocked from getting a remortgage on their home after their electricity bill surged to thousands of pounds a month.
Celebrities have also been affected, with artist Sir Grayson Perry’s monthly costs soaring from £300 to £39,000 before his bank account was emptied, and presenter Jon Sopel ‘choking on his cornflakes’ when his bill rose from £150 to £19,274.
EDF said ‘unusual’ direct debit changes could occur when incorrect meter readings were recorded on its system. The firm, which made a pre-tax UK profit of £1.1billion last year and paid its directors a total of £11million, claimed Sir Grayson and Mr Sopel’s cases were not part of a wider issue – and customers ‘do not need to worry’.
But has found some Britons are wrongly having their bills hiked to extortionate amounts and are being chased for thousands of pounds they don’t owe.
And in response to EDF’s claim that there ‘isn’t a broader issue with our system’, Mr Sopel said: ‘So did it only happen to Grayson Perry and me? I find that incredibly hard to believe. In all of the UK, the only two people it happened to were him and me – both with the ability to make a lot of noise. If so, how unlucky for you at EDF.’
has heard from some customers claiming they were told by EDF that their overcharging issues were related to a switchover onto a new system called Kraken – although neither Sir Grayson nor Mr Sopel’s bills are thought to be on this platform.
Many of the issues appear to be linked to smart meters – with 2.7million out of 33million meters in the UK not working properly according to Government figures.
** Hit by a massive EDF bill? Do you work for EDF? Can you explain the reasons behind the overcharging? Please email: [email protected] **
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The meters monitor how much gas and electricity a household is consuming and the cost of it in real time. Usually these readings are sent automatically to energy firms, but if the meter loses connection customers may have to rely on estimated bills.
How EDF paid bosses £11m last year and is led by an Italian clarinettist and father-of-two
EDF’s Simone Rossi
EDF, which stands for Électricité de France, is a French state-controlled energy firm that supplies electricity and gas to more than five million homes and businesses across Britain.
The company does not provide a breakdown of salaries for all of its directors, simply stating in its annual report for 2022 that the group’s ‘key management and governance personnel’ were paid a total of €12.5million (£10.9million) in salaries and bonuses last year.
EDF added that this figure was down by about a third from a total of €18.6million (£16million) in 2021, which included long-term bonuses for meeting performance criteria.
EDF Energy’s chief executive is Simone Rossi, 55, who has been with the firm since 2004 and was appointed into his current role in 2017. His salary is estimated to be about £1million a year.
Simone Rossi at the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in April 2022
Mr Rossi, a clarinet player from Italy who was chief financial officer of EDF Energy from 2011 to 2015, also previously held the post of CFO at EDF’s US joint venture Constellation Energy Nuclear Group before EDF pulled out of US nuclear industry.
As head of EDF’s international operations, he oversaw EDF investments in Africa and Latin America, including the Bolero solar plant in Chile, hydro power projects in Cameroon and Brazil and an off-grid solar project in West Africa.
Mr Rossi – who is married with two daughters – has a degree in business administration from Bocconi University in Milan and a degree in clarinet from Istituto Puccini in Gallarate.
Bills should be corrected once the supplier has received manual readings, but some customers have paid too much and struggled to get the money back. Others have not paid enough and found themselves in debt.
Customers of other firms also claimed to have been impacted, with an Eon customer saying her predicted annual bill was £12,000 for a one-bedroom flat in Bradford.
One energy industry source with knowledge of Kraken told today that the issues are likely related to EDF’s migration towards the system which is currently ongoing – and customers will not know about any problems until they see their bill.
They added that billing errors can also happen when a number is inputted wrong in recording usage, such as when a reading of ‘1,000.00’ is given instead of ‘100.000’.
The customer would then be charged assuming they consumed that extra energy, and assuming they continue to use that energy. It is also believed that mistakes similar to this could have happened while transferring data between systems.
Average energy bills are already set to rise in January from the equivalent of £1,834 a year to £1,928. And the UK’s energy watchdog Ofgem also unveiled plans last week to lift the energy price cap from April next year in order to help suppliers recover nearly £3billion in debts from customers who cannot pay their bills.
NHS doctor Lauren Huzzey’s three-day holiday was ruined by stress when she was told in August her electricity and gas bill was going to shoot up in October by 1,016 per cent from £122 to £1,362.
The single mother to her primary school-aged daughter cancelled her direct debit and said she wouldn’t have been able to pay her rent for her modest two-bedroom mid-terraced home if the money was taken out.
She spent days on long calls trying to speak to someone only for the monthly direct debit to suddenly be reduced to £147.
‘I missed a reading earlier in the year and all of a sudden my bill jumped,’ she told .
‘As it turned out, I only owed them £700 in the end. I cannot tell you how incredibly stressful all this was. I sat on long calls, just trying to speak to someone. In the end, I never actually spoke to a human being, they just ‘fixed’ it a few weeks later.
‘I was trying to work out how I would be able to afford it all. I spent days looking at accounts to see how I would afford it, but I couldn’t at all.’
She said it will take her two years to pay back the money she owes but hit out at the energy firm for the ‘disgusting’ way ‘they treat their customers’.
Grant Tanner’s EDF account was showing as being £1,443.80 in credit only for it to dramatically change in the space of a few hours to show him incredibly owing £7,401.89.
After a year of chasing Mr Tanner for the money, who claims they threatened to send debt collectors to his home, he says EDF admitted there was a mistake with the app.
He says that error is now stopping him from remortgaging his home.
‘Eventually after about a year they realised it was a mistake and it was just over £2,000 [that I owed],’ he said.
‘As a sorry they gave me a measly £50 but I could not be bothered to complain anymore. However, I’m now just remortgaging and have found I can’t get one because they have put a block on my credit report all because of their ridiculous errors which I find completely unacceptable.
‘I am now in the same process of calling and emailing to get this removed. I just wonder how many people they are doing this to!’
Others like Jason Seni are still fighting against ‘grossly inaccurate’ hikes after he noticed an abrupt change in the amount of money being taken out from his bank account.
Jon Sopel (left) and Sir Grayson Perry (right), who have been affected
His electricity bill in August was £306.11, but in September this more than doubled to £644.20. In just over a month later a bill of £2,085.16 landed in his inbox.
Mr Seni has since written a formal complaint to managing director Philippe Commaret about what he claims are ‘unlawful withdrawals’.
He says the latest payment ‘has resulted in severe financial hardship, leading to missed mortgage repayments and substantial overdraft charges’.
In an email to Mr Commaret, seen by , Mr Seni says: ‘It is unmoral to siphon customers accounts and send ridiculous high usage bill’s at anytime but pre Christmas it is certainly outrageous.’
Another told she basically had a nervous breakdown when a £3,400 bill landed on her doorstep leaving her ‘terrified’ to put her heating on for a year. It was later found that EDF owed her £299.
‘EDF made me think I was going mad,’ she said. ‘They made me fill in a form where I had to list every single appliance in my house – make, model, voltage etc.
‘That alone took me nearly two days to do to try and convince them I couldn’t be spending that amount of energy and why couldn’t they compare previous energy usage from last year. By their estimates I would have been spending nearly £28 per day.’
Mark Cutler is another who has lodged a complaint after being hit with a £4,700 bill for his three-bed home in Wombourne, South Staffordshire.
He says EDF charged him £2,400 for electricity over a 10-day period in the summer when there wasn’t even anyone in the home.
‘I have made a complaint and they keep telling me they’re resolving it,’ he said.
‘However, nothing makes sense in their billing process. My ‘smart meter’ has been offline for more than three months, yet they insist they’re getting readings, even though their own engineer says that they can’t be.’
A further EDF customer called Coll got in touch with to say: ‘Last month I’d noticed my direct debit had changed from £125 to £1,336.
‘I cancelled the direct debit, let them know and then did a switch to British Gas. The person I spoke to said that there was no way a direct debit could just be increased by that amount but I have a screenshot that says otherwise.
‘Good to know that it was not just me, suffice to say it’s bye bye to EDF forever as that is a really bad mistake for them to make.’
And reader John Heron said: ‘I had a smart meter installed which never worked. The engineer who visited after two years said the meter was 100ft away from my house and could never have worked.
‘Despite me sending in manual readings EDF continued to bill me on estimates. Eventually I got the ombudsman involved and that proved equally as fruitless because all EDF have to do is show they did their best to resolve the situation.
‘Basically, EDF lied by telling me that a smart meter would work. They continued with the charade of estimated readings until I lost patience and involved the ombudsman.’
EDF released a series of messages on X as it said other ‘customers don’t need to worry’ as it is not ‘related to a wider issue with our billing system’.
The company wrote: ‘Unusual changes to direct debit amounts can sometimes occur when there is an erroneous meter reading recorded on the system, but we have robust interventions in place to ensure that any large increases in customers’ direct debits are verified through a human check.
‘In almost all such cases, system errors are rectified and prevented without customers being impacted.’
Dr Lauren Huzzey’s three-day holiday was ruined when she saw her monthly EDF bill would skyrocket by 1,016 per cent
Dr Huzzey’s bill from EDF in August showed she was more than £2,500 in debit. She later found out she owed £700
A former EDF customer also responded to Sir Grayson’s post, sharing her own issues she had with the firm after they suddenly raised her bills to nearly £900 even though there were just two people in the property.
Lindsay wrote: ‘EDF put our energy bill up to just under £900 per month. Only two of us in the house.
‘When I asked for help and for them to explain why it was so high the girl on the online chat was just rude. Switched to Octopus and so far they seem much much better.’
She said that her bills were now just £120 per month with Octopus. ‘I feel sick to the stomach at the amount of money my mum lost through being with EDF,’ she added.
Another EDF customer replied to Mr Sopel’s post saying the firm is trying to charge £3,000 for two months of usage.
Connor Natella said he cannot get through to customer service and is receiving ‘increasingly threatening’ letters for payment.
He wrote: ‘They’re trying to get me on £3k for 2 months usage, can never get through and just receiving increasingly threatening letters through the door!’
EDF replied to Mr Natella, asking him to direct message in order to look into it further.
Meanwhile Eon customer Dena McGuinness told her predicted annual bill was £12,000 for a one-bedroom flat in Bradford.
Sir Grayson today revealed EDF had emptied his bank account after his energy bill suddenly skyrocketed from £300 a month to an astonishing £39,000 a month.
The artist received 15 different bills ranging between £200 and £6,000 and was told that the money would be taken by direct debit for all of them at once yesterday.
Sir Grayson, 63, was then unable access his bank account because EDF was trying repeatedly to take that money out – and they emptied the £2,500 which was in it.
He also credited a article about his ordeal – and a similar fate suffered by broadcaster Jon Sopel – with receiving a ‘very apologetic’ phone call later from EDF.
Sir Grayson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: ‘I suddenly out of the blue got a whole sheath of about 15 bills which added up to about £39,000.
‘They said they were going to deduct the money by direct debit for all those bills on the same day, which was yesterday. I just thought it was so bizarre. I tried on Friday, I spent about three hours at least trying to get some sense out of a call centre.
‘But you’re talking to a computer really, so it was very frustrating. They just sort of said well it says £39,000, that’s how much we’re going to take. But it’s a bizarrely huge amount of money for my electricity bill. They said that’s what it’s estimated.’
Sir Grayson said the saga was an ‘interesting fable of a technological age’ which began when EDF installed a smart meter at his ‘country studio’ despite him pointing out to the engineer there was no phone signal in the area.
He continued: ‘So they never had a record of how much I was using. And then when the bill comes, it’s just an estimation by a computer, I imagine there’s an algorithm that works it out.
‘Then we have the facelessness of the call centres. And then I feel frustrated because it’s taking this money automatically from my bank. And then the final chapter of the technological saga is I used Twitter to get a response.’
He said that he was not fond of celebrities using their ‘Twitter power’, but noticed that many other people online had suffered the same problem.
Sir Grayson added: ‘I just thought, what is it like if you’re some vulnerable person and this happens to you? I’m somebody who’s got a fair bit of cash or whatever, but it absolutely freaked me out.
‘It was just the injustice and completely surrealism of it that was kind of really, really upset me. Because call centres are guaranteed to make you frustrated, I think.’
Speaking about the 15 different bills, he said they ‘varied between sort of a few hundred and £6,000, but they were all being deducted on the same day’.
Sir Grayson said: ‘That was a sort of suspicious thing in the first place. And they emptied my bank account yesterday. They took about £2,500 out of my bank yesterday.’
Asked whether he had got the money back today, he said: ‘Well I don’t know, I haven’t checked yet. But I will be trying.’
He was also questioned over whether he had actually spent that money, but said: ‘The studio which the bills are for, I hardly use it. And that’s the weird thing.
‘These bills are much, much bigger than my main studio which I use all the time. So it’s not that I have used that much power. I haven’t burnt my way through £39,000 of electricity.’
As the interview drew to a close, presenter Nick Robinson then said: ‘Grayson, I’m delighted to see thanks to the benefit of Zoom or whatever application you’re on, that you’re staying warm by talking to us in bed.’
Sir Grayson replied: ‘Exactly, I’ve got the central heating turned right down now.’
Robinson then added: ‘Do you think you can turn this into a piece of art, this whole experience, Grayson?’
But Perry said: ‘No. I just wanted to say, EDF, the power of Twitter, I was on the Daily Mail website by lunchtime and then I got a phone call from EDF who were very apologetic. So I bear them no real ill will. But I think it’s the technology.’
It comes after Sir Grayson tweeted yesterday morning: ‘Hi @edfenergy. I’ve been trying to speak to someone to explain how my electricity bill went from £300 a month to £39,000.
‘Your call centre has been no help but you tried to direct debit this amount today from my account.’
Replying to him, an EDF customer services representative said: ‘Hi Grayson, I’m so sorry for any concern that this may have caused. Please send me a direct message with your account details and we’ll get this picked up straight away.’
Meanwhile broadcaster Mr Sopel said he ‘choked on my cornflakes’ when he discovered his monthly EDF bill had skyrocketed from £152 to a ‘ridiculous’ £19,274.
The former BBC journalist was among the energy firm’s customers left furious today when their bills surged by more than 12,000 per cent.
Mr Sopel, who presents The News Agents podcast, confirmed to he has a smart meter.
‘I choked on my cornflakes when we got the bill saying our monthly standing order was going up from £152 to £19,274 a month and i just wonder, like Grayson Perry, who else has had ridiculous bills like that and who has been frightened out their life because of it,’ Mr Sopel said through his agent Mary Greenham.
The logo of Electricite de France SA (EDF) is pictured on the facade of its offices in Paris
EDF said unusual changes to direct debit amounts can occur when an ‘erroneous meter reading [is] recorded on the system’.
Mr Sopel, who presents The News Agents podcast, wrote a public letter on X, formerly Twitter, to the French energy supplier asking if he could speak to a human rather than a bot about his monthly standing order rising from £152 to £19,274.
These tweets prompted other members of the public to share similar stories of EDF, saying they had been overcharged by thousands of pounds and received ‘threatening’ letters through the door for refusing the pay up.
Mr Sopel told EDF – which raked in a record £1.12billion profit last year – that his dramatically high bill ‘seems a bit steep’, before wishing them a ‘merry Christmas’.
Mr Sopel wrote: ‘Dear @edfenergy, Just had a notification that our monthly standing order is going up from £152 a month to £19,274. Seems a bit steep. Is there a human rather than a bot we can talk to? Many thanks and merry Christmas , Jon.’
He later posted a picture of his bill, tweeting: ‘I see explanation for these errant bills like @Alan_Measles [Sir Grayson Perry] is smart meters where there’s poor phone signal. We live about a mile from BT Tower with perfect phone reception.
![French energy firm EDF said unusual changes to direct debit amounts can occur when an 'erroneous meter reading [is] recorded on the system'](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/19/01/79096933-12878671-French_energy_firm_EDF_said_unusual_changes_to_direct_debit_amou-a-58_1702949791207.jpg)
French energy firm EDF said unusual changes to direct debit amounts can occur when an ‘erroneous meter reading [is] recorded on the system’
‘So why did we get this from @edfenergy? We’ve resolved now. But how many others have had this too?’
A spokesperson for EDF said that whilst they could not discuss the specifics of the cases, they confirmed they are ‘not related in any way’.
They added: ‘Customers do not need to worry – these are not related to a wider issue with our billing system and we’ve not made any changes to how we process direct debit changes for customers. Unusual changes to direct debit amounts can sometimes occur when there is an erroneous meter reading recorded on the system.
‘We have robust interventions in place to ensure that any large increases in customers’ direct debits are verified through a human check and in almost all such cases, system errors are rectified and prevented, without customers being impacted.’
** Hit by a massive EDF bill? Do you work for EDF? Can you explain the reasons behind the overcharging? Please email: [email protected] **