A while back, around late spring I launched a new webpage, and began getting odd calls from people in the meter registration department telling me that my electricity meter was unregistered and that I was paying the emergency tariff. I told them I wasn’t. I was in a serviced business unit and didn’t have an electricity account. Some didn’t believe me and the calls, often 10 to 15 a day were disruptive and sometimes insistent, but as I knew they were pointless it didn’t really bother me too much.
Then I decided to move, and even before the lease had been negotiated, let alone we received the keys to the new premises the meter registration department were back again. The odd thing I noticed was that these calls came from different numbers each time, but what they did have in common was that they ended with 006 and the caller usually had a Manchester accent. They urged me to register and stop paying the emergency tariff, warning me it can take months at the higher rate before the switch could take place I must act now.
I asked where they had got this information from, as nothing had been agreed and I was shocked at the level of detail they had, but noticed that some details were things I had revealed which were half truths to previous operatives earlier in the year, so clearly they were keeping a file. I started looking over my shoulder a great deal more.
So I did a bit of research. None of the company names given resulted in any website or other evidence of a legal commercial entity, I discovered that there is no such thing as a national meter register, nor any third party organisation appointed by the energy sector to manage or record data on meters and accounts, commercial or residential. Thus the requirement to register, was in fact bogus. I read stories of small firms who had given details to the Registration Department, and found themselves switched to new electricity suppliers with higher tariffs and with additional expense of contract release charges from their old suppliers, having no idea that they were being switched. so the organisation appeared to be a brokerage, but not surprisingly with these underhand tactics, was not a member of the Utilities Intermediaries Association.
After a few months of calls, with the operatives not only promising, but fulfilling their promise, of hounding me with calls till I signed up they eventually gave up. the air was still, at its height I had around 15 to 20 calls a day, and I could get on with setting up our new premises.
On the day that our new phone line was connected at the new premises, it rang out. I was surprised, we didn’t know the number yet, we had only been connected that day. It was the Meter Registration Department of Commercial Utilities, and so the calls began again.
Commercial Futilities 