ENERGY company npower is to pay £3.5 million to vulnerable customers after it was found to have breached energy sales rules.
Regulator Ofgem said the failings of doorstep and telesales staff meant customers were not able to make informed decisions on whether to switch suppliers.
The company remedied the shortcomings by September 2012 but has agreed to make a payment of at least £25 to each of its customers who receive the Warm Home Discount.
Ofgem said npower gained insufficient information about a customer's consumption to enable them to decide whether to switch. It also failed to ensure that comparisons between the price of npower's supply and that of the customer's current supplier were always based on the tariff that customers were on.
Npower will write to customers affected by the breaches before assessing whether they are entitled to compensation.
Paul Massara, npower's chief executive, said: "It's good to draw a line under this, so we can focus on our goal of becoming number one for customer experience by the end of 2015."
Ofgem's investigation started in August 2010 and relates to activities that took place between October 2009 and July 2012.
Earlier this month, npower wrote to customers apologising for what was described by Ofgem as a "serious deterioration" in customer service levels.
The German-owned energy giant admitted that a number of bills and statements had not gone out on time, while some direct debit payments were not set up properly.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article