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Taff
Having had conversations with people in Government, that's not how the system works. When the credit is applied to a credit account, the energy companies claim that money from the Treasury, in the same way as they claim the EPG discounts.
With the vouchers, it works a little differently, so I have been told.
The voucher is not for a 'cash top up'. That is to say, the money itself isn't actually 'on the voucher'. The voucher is 'coded' as a supplier credit. Only when the voucher is applied or redeemed through the Post Office does any money actually change hands. As in, when the voucher is redeemed, the money is then paid to the supplier by the Treasury.
Anyway, that's how it's been explained to me.
This is another reason why vouchers cannot be reissued immediately. There are several checks and balances to go through to determine whether a voucher has already been redeemed. This involves audit trails of transactions through the Post Office as well as several other anti fraud steps to go through.
I completely agree that the whole method of providing the credits has been very badly implemented, not just by E.On Next but by several other energy companies too.
As energy companies are perfectly capable of providing codes for meter keys or cards over the phone, or via email then why they couldn't just issue a code this way and you have it applied at the Post Office or a Payzone is a mystery to me. But someone, somewhere decided a voucher through the post, only redeemable with proof of name/address at a Post Office was the way to go.
Unfortunately, this had been doubly scuppered by the mail strikes as well as the sheer volume of additional mail going through the system over Christmas.
My postie told me that just in our very small depot, in a tiny rural corner of Wales, their backlog is running at two weeks and that's just for mail posted locally. If something is stuck in the system further up the chain, it could be three to four weeks before it ripples through. Nothing any of us can do about it, unfortunately.
We're getting hospital letters through the post this week for appointments that were scheduled for the beginning of December. Tickets I ordered for an event arrived a few days back. The event was mid-November and I ordered them at the beginning of November.
You just need to look at the pictures in the papers of trolleys full of mailbags sat out in the yard at one sorting office in Bristol to see the scale of the problem.
There are approximately 1.9 million customers with old fashioned prepay meters. They say a about a million vouchers have not been redeemed. I would imagine that some of these possibly have arrived and are happily sat on customers tables but haven't needed to be used yet. The rest may well be stuck in the post.
I have every sympathy for those who have not received theirs yet, but until E.On and others change the system going forward, there is no amount of complaining or shouting that will do anything to help with the already issued vouchers stuck in the mail.
