British Gas fined £9.5m for billing errors

British Gas has been fined £9.5m over failings in billing and complaint handling for business customers.

Energy regulator Ofgem acted after thousands of bills were delayed or inaccurately calculated following the supplier's move to a new IT system in 2014. The problem also prevented 6,000 new customers from moving over swiftly.

The company handled many complaints over the issues "poorly or not on time", said the watchdog, and had "let customers down".

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British Gas failed to hire "enough customer service staff to deal with the fallout", says the Daily Telegraph, resulting in those customers not being treated fairly.

Ofgem chief executive Dermot Nolan said: "Ofgem welcomes suppliers investing in new systems and recognises that this can be challenging.

"However, the £9.5m payment also sends a strong reminder to all energy companies that they must treat consumers fairly at all times, including while new systems are put in place."

British Gas initially compensated some customers and voluntarily reported the problems to the regulator, reports the BBC. It has since hired 350 more staff to handle the backlog of complaints, which it says have all been resolved.

Gab Barbaro, managing director of British Gas Business, said: "At the time, this was a major undertaking merging nearly 100 different systems into one. It didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked so we reported this to Ofgem as a priority.

"We have restored a very good quality of customer service and more and more of our customers are going online to use the new billing system.

"I'd like to apologise to our business customers for any inconvenience caused when we were implementing the system."