Did they have police and a court order? If not that is bulglary and they should be arrested.
I thought this was illegal without police presence?!
Edit – editing this for transparency, looks like it’s not quite as clear cut as I first thought. Better people have explained this in the comments.
This is breaking an entering and is a crime. Where are the police?
Scottish Power are the worst company I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with and it’s frankly astonishing that they are legally allowed to operate a basic utility as poorly as they do.
My friend worked for a power company. They had to shut off power due to non-attendance only problem was they went into the wrong house.
The homeowners found out when they came back from holiday, found the power shut off, and a shit left in their toilet.
How is this legal?
That’s absolutely shocking that two men are literally breaking into a single woman’s flat, whether she owes them a debt or not.
I’d love it if they broke into some 15 stone of pure muscle, unhinged nutter’s flat “by accident”
> Doorbell video footage shows two uniformed men tampering with locks before going into the flat and identifying themselves as Scottish Power representatives.
> The energy firm has admitted the error, apologised and offered compensation.
I hope they also identified the individuals concerned so that they can feel the full force of the law for breaking and entering. If not, charge the executive board with obstructing justice.
Until you make the execs feel threatened by consequences nothing will ever change. That’s true for Scottish Power, HSBC, and all the scummy operators.
I’m guessing the downvoters on this post are Scottish Power employees.
This must be a basic hazard. So regular, there ought to be a set plan for when this happens.
There could be but that would cost the business more.
Not shocked. Had a very bas experience with Scottish Power before in the past.
Would never ever recommend them.
“wrong home”… any home, surely?
Private sector goons have no power of entry
There is a clear need for debt teams, bailiffs, anyone whose job it is to intimidate and force entry into people’s homes, to be far more heavily regulated.
People should have a right to privacy and feel safe in their own homes. If these clowns are going round breaking in to people’s homes on behalf of billion pound companies with effectively zero due diligence, then something has to change ASAP.
>The woman’s father said his daughter was on holiday in the north of Scotland on 20 August when she received an alert from the video doorbell.
>Donald Maciver, 60, said she saw there were two men at the door and she realised they were trying to break into the flat.
>”She tried to engage with them through the intercom and they chose to ignore that, and then watched for a period of 43 seconds as two guys walked through the door,” he said.
Great ad for video doorbells. I mean it didn’t *stop* these horrible cunts but means she’s got it all on video.
>He said his daughter had reported the letters three times to Scottish Power but they kept sending written demands for unpaid money.
They shouldn’t be allowed to operate, this is disgraceful.
So it’s OK to break in to someones property if i’m prepared to pay £500 compensation if i’m caught?
That’s my takeaway from this.
The fuckers were in the property for 27 minutes with no explanation what they fuck they were actually doing when the meter is actually located down in the basement
> Yet two men were in this flat for 27 minutes, nobody can explain to me what they were doing in a two-bedroom flat for 27 minutes. They were supposed to be looking for gas meters – a gas meter that happens to be in the basement.”
The woman who was on holiday got the waring from her doorbell and tried to speak to them via the intercom which theses fucker simply ignored
> The woman’s father said his daughter was on holiday in the north of Scotland on 20 August when she received an alert from the video doorbell.
> Donald Maciver, 60, said she saw there were two men at the door and she realised they were trying to break into the flat.
> “She tried to engage with them through the intercom and they chose to ignore that, and then watched for a period of 43 seconds as two guys walked through the door,” he said
> The energy firm has admitted the error, apologised and offered compensation.
> It is the latest in a series of reports from BBC Scotland featuring allegations of heavy-handed measures by representatives of Scottish Power.
> The UK energy regulator Ofgem has now opened discussions with Scottish Power following the claims.
There really needs to be a change in the law that prevents any private companies entering homes uninvited.
Time again it is abused, and totally unnecessary, if they have issues, take through the courts.
But I bet you the police won’t so much as investigate. They’re seeming very corrupt lately.
Just an FYI: the energy sector is fucking busted due to privatisation being a fucking shitshow of bad data, poor handovers and corporate fuckery, but this kind of shit also happened pre-privatisation, and the protections for people during nationalisation were far less. Re-nationalisation would likely, in the short term, be just as much a shitshow as data transfers between barely-compatible systems get botched, fucked up or just don’t happen, though it would iron itself out in a decade or so.
So if you owe money to Scottish power they just send random blokes over to break into your house?
Who the hell signs up to do this job in the first place? Going around people’s houses, fiddling around with locks like a common criminal to try and scare people into giving you their money. Gross
Interesting to see what the procedure is in this case. They just give you five hundred quid so you don’t take them to court.
Fucking BBC have a cheek. They send me a threatening letter every month randomly accusing me of breaking the law by watching TV without a licence. They also send ridiculous uniformed “officers” to people’s houses to try to collect money that isn’t owed.
The BBC are just pissed off that somebody else has nicked their idea.
I had Scottish power send debt collectors after me because they failed to link the refund cheque to my account, meaning when I cashed it out my account became in debt. **Zero warning, no email, nothing.** Spend approx 2 hr combined on the phone including a call with a guy lying to me that this is correct and the debt was moved from another account etc. He couldn’t even recall and point me towards the payments and ended up sending me every single of my statements across 4 years and told me that I can find it myself. The level of mess they have in their accounting is astonishing.
What did plod do? Did they arrest the two neds for breaking and entering? That they’re paid hoods means this is gang land style extortion in action so the head of their gang should be arrested and pulled from his house. But pold.
Ok, so Scottish Power now hire burglars to come and rob your house if someone somewhere doesn’t pay a bill?
Absolutely disgusting. If I was in Scotland, I would avoid Scottish Power like the plague!
>On Friday, Scottish Power launched a probe after a whistleblower told the BBC that call handlers working on behalf of the energy giant were told to threaten customers with debt enforcement – even over mistaken bills.
>The man, an employee of an outsourced company, works in a call centre in the west of Scotland dealing with people who call to query outstanding balances.
Unless Scottish Power contract with multiple third party debt collector call centres, then I know exactly which company this guy works for, because I used to work there too.
Not sure if the sub rules allow me to name the company.
I never did the Scottish Power contract calls – where we would tell the “customer” that we were Scottish Power – I dealt with what I’ll call “late term” accounts where the people aren’t Scottish Power customers anymore, and we operated as “DCA Co Name, regarding a matter with Scottish Power,” plus the various other accounts including DVLA fines, HMRC tax credits, BT, Sky, etc.
Debt Collection on Utilities accounts is hellish.
Every adult living in the premises (or the owner for a vacant one) is jointly liable for the entire debt, not just the person who opened the account and pays the bills – so if you have a kid who’s now an Adult, still living with you, maybe at University or something, and there is a cock up with your electricity or gas bill and a debt accrues, if it isn’t paid, your kid can get a debt letter down the line and have that entire bill assigned to them, tanking their credit.
I’m pretty sure that the majority of accounts were people moving in/out of places and not updating the utilities correctly.
So Person A moves out of a place and doesn’t tell the utilities. Person B moves in and either forgets or deliberately doesn’t bother updating. Bills go unpaid for a few months and the Utility Company chases Person A for the debt.
They then have to prove their move in/out dates otherwise the debt remains theirs.
Probably the 2nd most common people I dealt with were people who’d shared a house or flat when they were younger, or maybe members of a former couple, and the person who was responsible for paying the bills didn’t – so, a few years down the line, we’ve been contracted to collect the debt – the debt hadn’t been sold yet – done an investigation and found that other people were living there at the time – so we’ve issued debt letters to those other people.
Lets say its £1000, and between 4 people.
They all agree to pay £250. 3 of them pay up, and one doesn’t.
All are still jointly liable, so we resume debt letters to all 4 of them for the remaining £250.
I had this issue with Scottish power, tried to change supplier because they are extortionate, transfer went smoothly, or so I thought, they actually hadn’t even transferred my gas over so I was assumed to be paying my new suppler for gas and electric, but was only with them for electric, had built up a massive debt with Scottish power, had a years fight with them about when I told the transfer happened, them denying it and wanting payment, for a year, I laughed at all their correspondence, they threatened me with this, debt collectors, I told them to bring stab vests, managed to eventually sort it, only paid them for the 3 months between when the transfer should of happened and when it did happen, not the entire year they tried to scam me for, they are cunts, always have been, the big 6 are notorious for threatening and trying to bully you out of money, fuck the lot of them.
The Ombudsman charge companies £500 per complaint, so they only offered her the same fee costs and an apology, and they get to keep 1 customer from adding to a list of ombudsman complaints. After so many, the ombudsman will fine the company.
I would have asked for £2,000 as a starting point to not let this go to court.
“£500 as a gesture of goodwill” can’t even say “by way of apology for our mistake”. Gesture of goodwill, man the good fuck up and apologise properly
They offered her £500 and an apology. Why are they not being arrested for breaking in to someone’s home?
Scottish power billed me for next door as well as my house for almost a year.
Absolute dipshits. Not surprised they did something this dumb.
Scottish Power are the worse company I have ever dealt with. Took them 2 years and many house visits to sort out the fact they set up 2 accounts against me.
Regardless of if she owed money, shouldn’t this be an issue for small claims court? Never should breaking into someone’s home be a thing regardless of how much money they owed.
This happened to us with NPower getting the address wrong and setting a debt collection agency on us, even though the property was not and had never been supplied by them. Trying to sort it out was a nightmare and twice we thought we had convinced the agency that they had fucked up, they sold the debt to another agency and the process started again. Fucking awful people.
People who are up in arms about this should know that the last time there was a full scale review of legislation that granted this type of power, there were over 300 separate Acts of Parliament that granted powers of entry, the oldest being the Distress for Rent Act 1737.
Locksmith here can tell you some dodgy shit here. From what it looks like by the way he is messing with the top night latch they have either picked the bottom lever lock,which is unlikely as that is a pretty tough technique and time consuming.More likely they have drilled out the bottom lock and are now moving to a method of lock by-passing we use to open top latches. Very uncommon to see “Bailiffs” using these techniques.
I moved into my (rented) house in 2018. A week later I had a letter from British Gas saying they were coming to change my meter to a pay as you go, because a debt had not been paid. I rang them, explained that I had only just moved in so any debt was not mine. They cancelled the changing of the meter.
The next Friday, I am out at work (personal assistant for my nephew has autism & learning difficulties). We come back to my house and there’s a key lockbox on the door, and my locks have been changed. British Gas had broken in, moved all my stuff from under the stairs, changed the meter to a pay as you go, and changed the locks behind them. There was a note saying in order to get the code I needed to ring them and supply documentation to prove who I was. It was all _obviously_ locked in the house which I now couldn’t get into.
I was distressed, my nephew was _very_ distressed, and the only thing I could think was that my estate agents had taken copies of my ID just before I moved in, so I rang (10 mins before closing on a Friday night) and the owner of the company stayed behind to get it sorted for me and didn’t leave until I’d let him know I’d got the code and was safe inside the house.
They broke into my house and went through my stuff after I’d expressly told them almost a week before that it wasn’t my debt and I’d only just moved, they gave me a pay as you go meter (which took 2 months to change back) and changed my locks on a Friday evening when, if I’d been stuck in traffic and home any later than the estate agent’s opening time, I wouldn’t have been able to get back in until the next morning.
Lots of complaints, explanations about my own anxieties, and the stress caused to my nephew (a vulnerable, disabled young adult) who was in tears seeing me so worried and having to sort it all out while I was supposed to be HIS emotional support. Eventually they sent me a cheque for £40. Joke.
Ah Scottish power. The company that charged me four thousand pounds of electricity on a one bedroom flat for one month.
39 comments
Did they have police and a court order? If not that is bulglary and they should be arrested.
I thought this was illegal without police presence?!
Edit – editing this for transparency, looks like it’s not quite as clear cut as I first thought. Better people have explained this in the comments.
This is breaking an entering and is a crime. Where are the police?
Scottish Power are the worst company I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with and it’s frankly astonishing that they are legally allowed to operate a basic utility as poorly as they do.
My friend worked for a power company. They had to shut off power due to non-attendance only problem was they went into the wrong house.
The homeowners found out when they came back from holiday, found the power shut off, and a shit left in their toilet.
How is this legal?
That’s absolutely shocking that two men are literally breaking into a single woman’s flat, whether she owes them a debt or not.
I’d love it if they broke into some 15 stone of pure muscle, unhinged nutter’s flat “by accident”
> Doorbell video footage shows two uniformed men tampering with locks before going into the flat and identifying themselves as Scottish Power representatives.
> The energy firm has admitted the error, apologised and offered compensation.
I hope they also identified the individuals concerned so that they can feel the full force of the law for breaking and entering. If not, charge the executive board with obstructing justice.
Until you make the execs feel threatened by consequences nothing will ever change. That’s true for Scottish Power, HSBC, and all the scummy operators.
I’m guessing the downvoters on this post are Scottish Power employees.
This must be a basic hazard. So regular, there ought to be a set plan for when this happens.
There could be but that would cost the business more.
Not shocked. Had a very bas experience with Scottish Power before in the past.
Would never ever recommend them.
“wrong home”… any home, surely?
Private sector goons have no power of entry
There is a clear need for debt teams, bailiffs, anyone whose job it is to intimidate and force entry into people’s homes, to be far more heavily regulated.
People should have a right to privacy and feel safe in their own homes. If these clowns are going round breaking in to people’s homes on behalf of billion pound companies with effectively zero due diligence, then something has to change ASAP.
>The woman’s father said his daughter was on holiday in the north of Scotland on 20 August when she received an alert from the video doorbell.
>Donald Maciver, 60, said she saw there were two men at the door and she realised they were trying to break into the flat.
>”She tried to engage with them through the intercom and they chose to ignore that, and then watched for a period of 43 seconds as two guys walked through the door,” he said.
Great ad for video doorbells. I mean it didn’t *stop* these horrible cunts but means she’s got it all on video.
>He said his daughter had reported the letters three times to Scottish Power but they kept sending written demands for unpaid money.
They shouldn’t be allowed to operate, this is disgraceful.
So it’s OK to break in to someones property if i’m prepared to pay £500 compensation if i’m caught?
That’s my takeaway from this.
The fuckers were in the property for 27 minutes with no explanation what they fuck they were actually doing when the meter is actually located down in the basement
> Yet two men were in this flat for 27 minutes, nobody can explain to me what they were doing in a two-bedroom flat for 27 minutes. They were supposed to be looking for gas meters – a gas meter that happens to be in the basement.”
The woman who was on holiday got the waring from her doorbell and tried to speak to them via the intercom which theses fucker simply ignored
> The woman’s father said his daughter was on holiday in the north of Scotland on 20 August when she received an alert from the video doorbell.
> Donald Maciver, 60, said she saw there were two men at the door and she realised they were trying to break into the flat.
> “She tried to engage with them through the intercom and they chose to ignore that, and then watched for a period of 43 seconds as two guys walked through the door,” he said
> The energy firm has admitted the error, apologised and offered compensation.
> It is the latest in a series of reports from BBC Scotland featuring allegations of heavy-handed measures by representatives of Scottish Power.
> The UK energy regulator Ofgem has now opened discussions with Scottish Power following the claims.
There really needs to be a change in the law that prevents any private companies entering homes uninvited.
Time again it is abused, and totally unnecessary, if they have issues, take through the courts.
But I bet you the police won’t so much as investigate. They’re seeming very corrupt lately.
Just an FYI: the energy sector is fucking busted due to privatisation being a fucking shitshow of bad data, poor handovers and corporate fuckery, but this kind of shit also happened pre-privatisation, and the protections for people during nationalisation were far less. Re-nationalisation would likely, in the short term, be just as much a shitshow as data transfers between barely-compatible systems get botched, fucked up or just don’t happen, though it would iron itself out in a decade or so.
So if you owe money to Scottish power they just send random blokes over to break into your house?
Who the hell signs up to do this job in the first place? Going around people’s houses, fiddling around with locks like a common criminal to try and scare people into giving you their money. Gross
Interesting to see what the procedure is in this case. They just give you five hundred quid so you don’t take them to court.
Fucking BBC have a cheek. They send me a threatening letter every month randomly accusing me of breaking the law by watching TV without a licence. They also send ridiculous uniformed “officers” to people’s houses to try to collect money that isn’t owed.
The BBC are just pissed off that somebody else has nicked their idea.
I had Scottish power send debt collectors after me because they failed to link the refund cheque to my account, meaning when I cashed it out my account became in debt. **Zero warning, no email, nothing.** Spend approx 2 hr combined on the phone including a call with a guy lying to me that this is correct and the debt was moved from another account etc. He couldn’t even recall and point me towards the payments and ended up sending me every single of my statements across 4 years and told me that I can find it myself. The level of mess they have in their accounting is astonishing.
What did plod do? Did they arrest the two neds for breaking and entering? That they’re paid hoods means this is gang land style extortion in action so the head of their gang should be arrested and pulled from his house. But pold.
Ok, so Scottish Power now hire burglars to come and rob your house if someone somewhere doesn’t pay a bill?
Absolutely disgusting. If I was in Scotland, I would avoid Scottish Power like the plague!
>On Friday, Scottish Power launched a probe after a whistleblower told the BBC that call handlers working on behalf of the energy giant were told to threaten customers with debt enforcement – even over mistaken bills.
>The man, an employee of an outsourced company, works in a call centre in the west of Scotland dealing with people who call to query outstanding balances.
Unless Scottish Power contract with multiple third party debt collector call centres, then I know exactly which company this guy works for, because I used to work there too.
Not sure if the sub rules allow me to name the company.
I never did the Scottish Power contract calls – where we would tell the “customer” that we were Scottish Power – I dealt with what I’ll call “late term” accounts where the people aren’t Scottish Power customers anymore, and we operated as “DCA Co Name, regarding a matter with Scottish Power,” plus the various other accounts including DVLA fines, HMRC tax credits, BT, Sky, etc.
Debt Collection on Utilities accounts is hellish.
Every adult living in the premises (or the owner for a vacant one) is jointly liable for the entire debt, not just the person who opened the account and pays the bills – so if you have a kid who’s now an Adult, still living with you, maybe at University or something, and there is a cock up with your electricity or gas bill and a debt accrues, if it isn’t paid, your kid can get a debt letter down the line and have that entire bill assigned to them, tanking their credit.
I’m pretty sure that the majority of accounts were people moving in/out of places and not updating the utilities correctly.
So Person A moves out of a place and doesn’t tell the utilities. Person B moves in and either forgets or deliberately doesn’t bother updating. Bills go unpaid for a few months and the Utility Company chases Person A for the debt.
They then have to prove their move in/out dates otherwise the debt remains theirs.
Probably the 2nd most common people I dealt with were people who’d shared a house or flat when they were younger, or maybe members of a former couple, and the person who was responsible for paying the bills didn’t – so, a few years down the line, we’ve been contracted to collect the debt – the debt hadn’t been sold yet – done an investigation and found that other people were living there at the time – so we’ve issued debt letters to those other people.
Lets say its £1000, and between 4 people.
They all agree to pay £250. 3 of them pay up, and one doesn’t.
All are still jointly liable, so we resume debt letters to all 4 of them for the remaining £250.
I had this issue with Scottish power, tried to change supplier because they are extortionate, transfer went smoothly, or so I thought, they actually hadn’t even transferred my gas over so I was assumed to be paying my new suppler for gas and electric, but was only with them for electric, had built up a massive debt with Scottish power, had a years fight with them about when I told the transfer happened, them denying it and wanting payment, for a year, I laughed at all their correspondence, they threatened me with this, debt collectors, I told them to bring stab vests, managed to eventually sort it, only paid them for the 3 months between when the transfer should of happened and when it did happen, not the entire year they tried to scam me for, they are cunts, always have been, the big 6 are notorious for threatening and trying to bully you out of money, fuck the lot of them.
The Ombudsman charge companies £500 per complaint, so they only offered her the same fee costs and an apology, and they get to keep 1 customer from adding to a list of ombudsman complaints. After so many, the ombudsman will fine the company.
I would have asked for £2,000 as a starting point to not let this go to court.
“£500 as a gesture of goodwill” can’t even say “by way of apology for our mistake”. Gesture of goodwill, man the good fuck up and apologise properly
They offered her £500 and an apology. Why are they not being arrested for breaking in to someone’s home?
Scottish power billed me for next door as well as my house for almost a year.
Absolute dipshits. Not surprised they did something this dumb.
Scottish Power are the worse company I have ever dealt with. Took them 2 years and many house visits to sort out the fact they set up 2 accounts against me.
Regardless of if she owed money, shouldn’t this be an issue for small claims court? Never should breaking into someone’s home be a thing regardless of how much money they owed.
This happened to us with NPower getting the address wrong and setting a debt collection agency on us, even though the property was not and had never been supplied by them. Trying to sort it out was a nightmare and twice we thought we had convinced the agency that they had fucked up, they sold the debt to another agency and the process started again. Fucking awful people.
People who are up in arms about this should know that the last time there was a full scale review of legislation that granted this type of power, there were over 300 separate Acts of Parliament that granted powers of entry, the oldest being the Distress for Rent Act 1737.
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protection-of-freedoms-act-2012-documents-powers-of-entry](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/protection-of-freedoms-act-2012-documents-powers-of-entry)
Locksmith here can tell you some dodgy shit here. From what it looks like by the way he is messing with the top night latch they have either picked the bottom lever lock,which is unlikely as that is a pretty tough technique and time consuming.More likely they have drilled out the bottom lock and are now moving to a method of lock by-passing we use to open top latches. Very uncommon to see “Bailiffs” using these techniques.
I moved into my (rented) house in 2018. A week later I had a letter from British Gas saying they were coming to change my meter to a pay as you go, because a debt had not been paid. I rang them, explained that I had only just moved in so any debt was not mine. They cancelled the changing of the meter.
The next Friday, I am out at work (personal assistant for my nephew has autism & learning difficulties). We come back to my house and there’s a key lockbox on the door, and my locks have been changed. British Gas had broken in, moved all my stuff from under the stairs, changed the meter to a pay as you go, and changed the locks behind them. There was a note saying in order to get the code I needed to ring them and supply documentation to prove who I was. It was all _obviously_ locked in the house which I now couldn’t get into.
I was distressed, my nephew was _very_ distressed, and the only thing I could think was that my estate agents had taken copies of my ID just before I moved in, so I rang (10 mins before closing on a Friday night) and the owner of the company stayed behind to get it sorted for me and didn’t leave until I’d let him know I’d got the code and was safe inside the house.
They broke into my house and went through my stuff after I’d expressly told them almost a week before that it wasn’t my debt and I’d only just moved, they gave me a pay as you go meter (which took 2 months to change back) and changed my locks on a Friday evening when, if I’d been stuck in traffic and home any later than the estate agent’s opening time, I wouldn’t have been able to get back in until the next morning.
Lots of complaints, explanations about my own anxieties, and the stress caused to my nephew (a vulnerable, disabled young adult) who was in tears seeing me so worried and having to sort it all out while I was supposed to be HIS emotional support. Eventually they sent me a cheque for £40. Joke.
Ah Scottish power. The company that charged me four thousand pounds of electricity on a one bedroom flat for one month.
And no I wasn’t growing weed. Not then anyway.