JESSICA BEARD: British Gas is in the gutter… the boss must go
The British Gas service is in the gutter. Enough is enough. The man who was in charge of our once great national energy supplier must go, writes JESSICA BEARD
Enough is enough. British Gas HomeCare has been disappointing customers for years with its appalling service.
And you told us the energy giant has been up to its old tricks again this winter – abandoning families in their hour of need when their boiler breaks down.
Money Mail’s mailbag groans with complaints against British Gas and the boiler cover arm. Many are outraged that they are out in the cold for weeks or unable to book service.
Others have postponed or rescheduled appointments with very little notice. Some engineers just never show up.
It baffles me why so many people (three million at last count) pay for HomeCare year after year when it costs around £100 to have your boiler serviced and around £1,200 to replace one.
Sad achievement: Chris O’Shea (pictured) – chief exec of British Gas’s parent company Centrica – has accepted a £4.5m pay package
The cover is getting so expensive that one customer, Eev Rhodes, told us she now faces a premium of £1,089.
And that’s after an engineer left her with a flooded house. Isn’t it a better plan to put money you would have spent on premiums in a rainy day savings account that pays interest?
Against an embarrassing backdrop of appalling service and sky-high prices, Chris O’Shea – CEO of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas – has accepted a £4.5 million pay package, including a whopping £3.7 million bonus. He should be ashamed.
In 2022, the HomeCare arm of British Gas won our annual Wooden Spoon award for shoddy service. At the time, Mr O’Shea agreed to accept the trophy, but only on a Zoom video call.
He was dressed casually in a blue hoodie and revealed that he worked from home. He ruefully expressed his “frustrations” about engineers not showing up.
He fully agreed that the service his company provided was unacceptable.
He promised a system update to help engineers see that there should be more customers one day when this winter is just over.
Mr. O’Shea assured us that he had identified where the problems were and, while he couldn’t fix them overnight, he would fix them.
A year later and not much seems to have changed. Except for the much higher price tag, Mr. O’Shea’s lewd bonus – and a worrying new disregard for customers.
When British Gas won our Wooden Spoon again in January, Mr. O’Shea declined requests to discuss his firm’s woeful service and a spokesperson said he was too busy to accept the award.
Yes, the past year has been challenging for energy companies as the energy price crisis raged. But that’s no excuse for refusing to face your own shortcomings.
British Gas — once our national energy supplier — should be the standard for rivals. Instead, the service is in the gutter. Perhaps it’s time it was stripped of the ‘British’ in its name. British gas? More like Broken Gas.
As for Mr. O’Shea, I’m afraid he’s now had every chance to turn the ship around – and he’s failed. He must return his bumper bonus and resign.
Don’t be a savings…
Week in, week out, Money Mail is full of warnings about the tricks banks are playing to keep you earning stingy returns on your savings.
Our savings guru Sylvia Morris says that the banks are setting more and more traps.
Last week I was the target of a common ruse. NatWest sent me a celebratory text announcing an increase in interest rates on my Savings Builder account, to 2.02 percent. But that’s way out of line.
Small rival banks are now paying as much as 3.26 percent in easily accessible deals. That’s more than 60 percent better than NatWest’s deal.
Festive text? Pull the other. With interest rates rising, there’s no excuse to dwell on a low-paying deal. Don’t be the fool of saving in April.
j.beard@dailymail.co.uk