Increase to Direct Debit - new way of calculating Direct Debit amount?

As Firedog points out paying by a non Direct Debit method does cost a little bit more. However, I do make savings during the summer months allowing me to make some interest on that in the bank or building society ready for the higher bills in the winter.

Perhaps another advantage is calculating payments is not required as a pay bill in full on demand customer. I just pay each month what is due. SSE used to and I believe Octopus Energy do allow a variable Direct Debit payment of the full bill monthly. There will be a reason OVO and some other energy providers do not allow this method of payment which is used by other utilities such as telecoms providers. Not sure what this reason is.

The VAT rate is due to change from 5% to 0% in October so you may wish to factor this into the calculation.  

If you are on a “fixed tariff”, you are protected from price changes, BUT that just fixes the amount that you pay per kWh and the amount you pay for your daily standing charge, it does not fix the Direct Debit which is determined by your actual usage. Direct Debits are reviewed, regularly, by OVO and they have a responsibility to ensure that customers do not run the risk of debt. 

However, if you think that this increase is incorrect, it is worth contacting OVO. I never phone OVO and always use the Messenger facility on Facebook.  Whenever I have been faced with this situation, I send evidence showing why I think that their amount is incorrect. 

First of all, I work out, using the Future annual consumption (found on your My Plan page when you LOG IN to your account) what a reasonable estimate for my annual costs will be. This is what mine would look like at the moment.

If I divide my total by 12, this gives £100.71 as a reasonable Direct Debit.

However, OVO expect you to have a credit of, at least, one month’s DD payment in your account AT ALL TIMES. So for me, I would have to add this £100.71 to my Total giving  1309. 28. I then have to divide that total by 12. This would give £109.11. It is likely that OVO would suggest £110 for me.

These calculations assume no credit (which I would subtract from the Total figure) or debt (which I would add to the Total figure) BEFORE working out a sensible DD amount. 

The term I used was ‘significantly more’. Of course, what is significant for one may be insignificant for another, and one man’s little bit might cause another to choke. I just did a back-of-an-envelope calculation to see how big the difference is in fact. Using the GB average figures for single-rate electricity and gas for this quarter and the current typical usage values (electricity 2700 and gas 11500 kWh/year), this was the result:
 

Apologies for any mistakes. The Direct Debit total of totals comes to £1862(.66), widely reported as the price cap for the current quarter.

These sums show that it would cost the typical dual-fuel customer £142 annually - almost £12 a month - for the privilege (some would say ‘inconvenience’) of paying on receipt of bill. 

This has been one of the main reasons I have left OVO this week. Over the last 2 years I have consistently been building credit, to the extent I have been lowering my DD at every opportunity. (It was even accumlating to the rate, that about every week if I went onto the Direct Debit Screen it showed I could lower it by a few pounds).

However, it got to the point that the accumlated funds were 10x the monthly direct debit and I’d never had a single month in 4 years where my bill for the month was higher than the DD. The final straw for me when I had an e-mail to say that they were going to increase my direct debit again by just under 2.5x what it was. When I run them I got the same spiel as above about it being projected so it’s in credit with one month by the following March.

SO…. I did an excercise and calculated on my fixed term, and for when it ended the variable rate that it would move to, taking the maximum monthly electricity and gas figure I’d had since I’d been with OVO, and using that to work out exactly how much it would be if I used the same amount of electricity and gas every month, as the highest month in my whole history… And it came in as much lower. (about 2/5ths per month of the direct debit they were asking for - so I would have been accumulating a huge amount of credit).

I spoke to them on the phone in length, again had the same spiel, and they agreed to freeze my direct debit at 10% less than they suggested for three months, and recommended I claim a refund if it is accumlating again at the end of those three months.

… Which I did… And as soon as I did the next week, I got an e-mail to say my direct debit was going to be raised even higher again.

… So I spoke in length to a very helpful agent, and we went through all of the individual figures I’d previosuly worked out to try an understand why my direct debit was what it was. And this was where the penny dropped for the agent, becuase in her words “I don’t understand why you’re paying this much with your history of usage over the last 4 year”… And she worked out that the “projected annual usuage” for electrity was wildly out (and the gas was a little high, but not enough to be concerned about). So much so, my account was projected my annual electricty usage as 3x the units that I’d ever used in a single year since I lived in my property. She was quite clear there was a problem with the way the system was generating my predicted usage and explained all my issued stemmed from this issue and escallated it to their technical team, becuase it was a foundational issue with this calculation that she admitted was not providing a correct figure. I was confident that she’d managed to get to grip with all of the figures we’d talked to and she’d got to the crux of the problem in passing it over to be fixed… I would be called in the next 2/3 weeks with a resolve but until then a note was put on my account to prohibit any direct debit rises for the next three months as a safeguard.

… All this was 10 months ago, I never got that call. I have since rang 4 times since for an update. The first time had to explain it all again and go through all the figures as I was told all the same spiel again, despite having a log number for the escallation… and that it would be raised as a new complaint. The second time I was told it had been resolved and they would need to raise it again. The thrid time, I rang becuase my direct debit had been raised again - and was told it would be chased. Again never receiving a promised call back. And then the forth time, which was 2 months ago, was told the original complaint hadn’t been raised as the correct type of issue, after having to go through the entire figures and conversation again was told it was now escallated in the right way, to the right teams and someone would call me in the next 4 week to update me on how they were resolving the issue with this system issue generating too high annual usage.

…. Needless to say that call never came and my last fixed term came to an end. (With my account being roughly 8x in credit of my months direct debit). I can only believe that this change to their ‘March’ calculation and this over inflated calculation of energy usage which is higher than the energy I’ve every used is somehow deliberately built into the system for them to profit over the excess credit they have from their customers. I no longer trust their integrity and have now moved to another supplier that just takes a DD out for the exact amount of bill for that last month - so I know I’m paying for exactly what I’ve used and they aren’t skimming over any credit they have swimming in their accounts.

I encourage everyone who had a direct debit to do the same. Have your unit rate and standing charges, work out what the most you’ve used in a year is and see using that volume of units if it’s anywhere near what they think you’ll be using… If it’s not, it appears that they are doing it to everyone else too and haven’t made any changes to their system to recitify this (deliberately or otherwise).