OVO have lost my FIT account!?

Hey @mshealey,

I’m sorry to hear this, 

I’m not sure what the next steps are if a supplier isn’t able to deliver the Ombudsman remedy. It seems you have now been passed to a team that deal exactly with that.

I hope this gets sorted for you. 

Hi @mshealey have you let the Ombudsman know?

They can follow up with a supplier on your behalf.

The 28 days suppliers have is legally enforceable. I wouldn't recommend it apart from extreme cases but you can take ovo to court to enforce the ruling and the court will undoubtedly find in your favour. I would personally not do that in this case and ask the Ombudsman to follow up.

So 1st February and no payments yet received from OVO. They haven’t even paid us the £75 compensation agreed with the ombudsman. They manually calculated some of our payments on January 5th and said they would send out cheques. Now they say the cheques will arrive in mid February. (Our ombudsman agreed date was January 10th).   Have we got more chance of winning the lottery than getting paid by OVO?
 

Hey @mshealey,

I’m sorry to hear this,

We have to accept the Ombudsman decision, I advise getting in touch with them:

• Phone: 0330 440 1624 (Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm, and Saturday, 9am to 1pm)
• Email: enquiry@energyombudsman.org
• Website: www.energyombudsman.org
• Post: Energy Ombudsman, PO Box 966, Warrington WA4 9DF

Were you assigned a specific complaints handler? If so, it might be worth emailing them as well advising the Ombudsman remedy hasn’t been applied. 

Update on our missing FITS payment: I received a statement from OVO stating they owe us around £1300, which agrees with my calculations. They say they will pay us in four weeks. This does represent an improvement, but they have owed us this money since October. If I were a supply customer, I wonder how they'd react if I told them I would pay for my electricity in five months' time?

I’m glad to hear there is some improvement, please keep us posted @MLOwen.

Hi all. Just to reply to Emanuelle

No progress to report whatsoever. The ombudsman is useless. Our representative does not answer his phone, doesnt expect OVO to do anything and when we press him, contacts OVO and reports back things like “OVO say your account fix is imminent”

Within OVO itself, we have a contact person, but she has no power to get anybody to do anything or to provide us with information.  She has assured us that we will get paid some payments in mid-February ( Valentine’s Day was yesterday lol) but she can’t  say how much  She also doesn’t answer her phone or emails.  Another member of her department told us we wouldn’t get paid anything until our account was set up 

We have asked several times about interest on the money they owe us from October but have not had a reply

OVO have still not sent us our “goodwill” payment of £75 awarded by the ombudsman in December.

So in short, OVO have not paid us any money whatsoever, they have not set up our account, they will not provide any information about what they are doing  

We have been trying to get this sorted since September (5 months)

The ombudsman is not doing anything to enforce their ruling  

We are very stressed 

Help anybody 

It's jawdropping,  isn't it. 

Have you thought about writing to the Money columns of The Times or Daily Telegraph? They are often good at sorting these things out. 

Hey @mshealey,

I’m really sorry to hear this,

I’ll get Forum_Support to reach out, please keep an eye on your private messages.

I should not have assumed that with the receipt of these payments that OVO knew what they were doing and had sorted the issues! On 4/3/24 I again spoke to OVO, chasing the payments for the generation reading submitted on 4/12/23, I was told that a payment of about £525 would be made within 2 weeks which would include the payment for the readings submitted on 19/9/23 (which we had already been paid by cheque). I told OVO this and that our payment should only be £176.90 for the December generation readings.

Having heard nothing by 19/3/24, I phoned again to chase payment, only to be told that the support agent had tried to phone back after the call on the 4th. The call had not been answered, but no message left or any other furthe action taken. Apparently, before payment could be made, a meter inspection was required. Upon seeking confirmation that this was for the generation meter, I was told it was for the export meter - I had opted out of export payments on 19/9/23! OVO admitted they had the email I had sent confirming this, but had not actioned it. The agent raised a complaint on our behalf.

On 22/3/24 I received a statement from OVO for a payment of £653.88, comprising the generation payment of abot £350 for the readings submitted 19/9/23 (already paid once!) plus an export payment of just over £300 for readings off our export meter (correct serial number on the statement) for export from 1/7/2016 to 31/3/2017 - the current import/export meter with the serial no. as quoted was only installed in mid 2023! This payment duly arrived in our bank account on 26/3/24. I spoke to OVO on both the 22/3/24 and again today. On neither occasion have I been able to get any sensible answers as to what is going on. 

I am currently transferring my FIT registration to Octopus, having totally lost patience with OVO. I reckon I am due about £307 for the generation readings submitted in December plus the geneation up to the reading submitted for Octopus to take it over. Whilst at least we have been paid more than we are due, it is not good having cash sitting in our account that does not belong to us. I just want to get it sorted and get OVO out of my hair.

Sorry to hear you are still having so much trouble. We were finally paid what we were owed, just before the four weeks were up. For what it's worth, Eon are paying us within a week of us submitting our readings! 

This is goodbye and good luck from me!

Hi all

Just to update you on our case. OVO have still not paid us, and are refusing to talk to us or sort anything out. They are also refusing to talk to the ombudsman.  

To recap OVO lost our FIT account when they transferred it from SSE in August 2023. They refused to do anything about it so we had to go to the ombudsman. The ombudsman man told OVO to set up our account and pay us by January 10th 2024. They didn’t

Only after intervention from this forum, (for which many thanks) OVO  finally registered our account on 23rd February and paid us around 10% of what they owed us.  

They told us that they would pay the outstanding balance with our FIT payment in May.  They haven’t.  And we haven’t had a May FIT payment at all. When we got in touch with the FIT team  at the beginning of May, they said it needed to go to their back office and we would get told what was happening in a further six weeks. After all we’ve been through to get this far, we could cry.
 

In February they  signed off our case with the ombudsman as complete.  The OVO complaints team will no longer talk to us because they say the case closed. We went back to the ombudsman who has told them their remedies are incomplete Guess what OVO is refusing to talk to the ombudsman  The ombudsman has escalated it to a more senior member of staff. But seems to be making no progress 
 

What on earth can we do next?  Please help

I thought our experience with OVO was bad, but it's nothing compared with yours! Perhaps taking them to the small claims court could provide a route forward? They really deserve to have a winding up petition issued against them, but the costs of that make it a non-starter!

Our own issues with OVO still have not reached a conclusion. Today we received a notification from them that they have failed to resolve our complaint issued on 19/3/24 within the required 8 weeks and advising that we could now take it to ombudsman. Our transfer to Octopus appears to be operating fine now - Octopus are reading our smart export meter daily and have advised that the FIT generation is live with them, so as OVO have overpaid us (as have Scottish Power for the few months we were with them for SEG export payments due to them taking the start meter reading as 0 instead of the value we gave them), we will just leave it to OVO to get their house in order - I have given them all the information they need to sort it out. If and when they come back and ask for us to refund any money, we will decide then whether to do so, and over what timescale!

Good luck with your saga - hope it gets resolved soon!