British Gas paid me £38,000 by mistake, and I can’t give it back

British Gas paid me more than £38,000 by mistake, then had no idea how to reclaim it. I receive quarterly feed-in tariff (Fit) payments for energy exported by my solar panels.

In May, I submitted a claim for £300, based on my meter reading, and I received an email stating that I was due £38,611.59.

This sum was paid the next day and remained there for more than seven weeks. Despite me ringing and writing constantly, there seemed to be no procedure for reclaiming the payment, and no one knew what to do.

I knew it was illegal to spend money I am not entitled to, but it was embarrassing to have it in my current account, and I feared some kind of fraud may have been involved.

The funds finally left my account a week ago, but I have been unable to establish from British Gas if they have received it. The scripts given to customer service agents don’t cover such an incident. Moreover, I have still not received the £300 Fit payment that I’m entitled to.

DT, Sale

Your unwelcome windfall followed news of a payment of £6,800 by Yorkshire Water to a perplexed customer who, like you, had to cajole the company for weeks to take it back.

In that case, an employee had mistyped their bank details when updating their payroll entry, and so their salary had been paid twice (unnoticed!) to the wrong account.

Your ordeal was also the result of a butter-fingered agent who entered the wrong meter reading, according to British Gas.

What is extraordinary is that these utilities companies, which are so good at pursuing customer debts, seemingly have no process to check self-evidently bonkers credits, and no interest in recovering misdirected funds.

The money landed in your account on 14 May and was not reclaimed until 14 July. It is a potential offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the Theft Act to fail to report money erroneously paid to you. And a company could sue through the civil courts if you spent what they so carelessly remitted – so you did the right thing legally as well as morally in persevering.

British Gas belatedly recognised this and has offered you £500 in compensation for your trouble. It also – two months late – coughed up the Fit payment that you were actually due, although this time it underestimated it by £2, and you had to rattle its cage for what I hope is the final time.

‘Missed’ British Gas payments

While you were pondering the unbidden bounty from British Gas, another eco-minded customer had his credit rating trashed when the company pursued him for invented debts.

When JG installed a heat pump in his Berkshire home, he terminated his gas account and arranged for British Gas to remove the gas meter. British Gas duly obliged and issued a final statement showing a £430 credit, which it refunded.

That was in November 2024. Two months later, JG received the first of a succession of estimated gas bills for the supply that no longer existed. JG had to laboriously contest each one.

“Ultimately, in January this year, I thought we had finally dealt with the problem,” he writes. “In March, I got a letter from the bank, saying they were massively reducing my overdraft facility.

“It turned out that British Gas had reported to credit reference agencies that I had missed six payments and that there was a default amount of £833 on my British Gas account.”

The six missed payments were eventually removed by British Gas from his credit record after he complained, but the imaginary £833 default remained for all lenders to see and be alarmed by.

“British Gas seems unable to deal with a property that no longer has a gas supply,” writes JG.

Only when I intervened did the company discover that it had forgotten to record the disconnected meter on its system, and had forgotten to remove the debt marker from JG’s credit record.

It is rather pleased with itself that, all by itself and before JG involved the press, it had cancelled the £833 bill (if not the registered “default”) and replaced it with a mystery charge of 32p.

Magnanimously, it has now refunded the latter sum and added £150 in goodwill, which JG says is a paltry reflection of the stress, financial damage and sheer number of hours of hassle the mistake has caused him.

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