Energy company E.ON was prepared to leave a disabled customer without power overnight despite the serious risk it posed to his safety.
The incident – and what followed – revealed a pattern of the energy supplier’s systemic failures when it comes to providing an equitable service. Crucially, the ordeal draws attention to serious issues at the heart of the private energy sector – one that’s failing to prevent causing harms to its chronically ill and disabled customers.
E.ON: prepared to leave a disabled customer without power overnight
A catalogue of failures by energy corporation E.ON came close to endangering the life of a disabled customer on its priority register.
Due to a serious accident in 2004, in which he suffered both brain and spinal injury, Gav lives with a number of health conditions. He experiences constant chronic pain due to spinal damage to his C4 and C5 vertebrae. He also lives with Post-Traumatic Concussion Syndrome, PTSD, and anxiety. Gav is currently awaiting surgery for his spine, as well as for damage to his ulna nerve in his elbow, which has resulted in him losing feeling to his hand. Gav has significant mobility problems due to his constant chronic severe neck and back pain and is a regular wheelchair-user.
In February 2025, Gav’s property was among around 2,700 homes in Tunbridge Wells in Kent to experience a total power outage. UK Power Networks restored power to the area within an hour – so by midday, it had resolved the issue. However, Gav’s was seemingly the sole residence still left without power.
Initially, he contacted his energy company, E.ON. It told him to call the UK Power Networks, and an engineer quickly came out to test his meter. As with all other homes in the area, the in-feed from the street to his meter was live. However, in his case, the meter was not sending power to his property. In other words, his meter was evidently broken.
But it was at this point that Gav’s problems with E.ON began. What should have been a simple case of E.ON sending someone to fix or fit him a new meter became an exasperating, and increasingly distressing back-and-forth with his energy company.
Profit motives: repeated meter cancellations
Once the UK Power Networks engineer had identified the problem was with the meter, Gav had once again contacted E.ON.
Initially, it tried to deny responsibility for the problem with his meter. Gav explained to the Canary that he had the E.ON representative on loudspeaker while the UK Power Network engineer:
stood next to me [Gav] with his jaw on the floor in disbelief.
Gav detailed how E.ON:
were trying to basically put the blame on them.
Six hours of calls to E.ON ensued trying to get the company to send an engineer out to fit a new meter. Three times E.ON confirmed it would come to fit one. Three times it cancelled the fittings.
By 8pm, he still had no one coming out from E.ON to fit him a new meter. At this point, Gav explained how he had 14% left on his mobile phone.
Despite the fact that Gav is on E.ON’s priority register as a disabled customer, it acted with no urgency to resolve the issue. Instead, Gav had to spell out the dangers of being without power overnight posed to him.
Dangers of being without power overnight
Gav lives on his own. He would have had no lights, no heating, no hot water, and no electricity whatsoever for his appliances. If he had tripped and injured himself in the night, or had a medical emergency, he’d have had no way to call for help:
I’m a disabled person – I need my phone just in case I fall over and have an accident, I’ll need to call an ambulance yeah, so this could cause my death.
With low battery on his phone, he’d explained all this to E.ON. An E.ON representative he spoke to at this stage told him she’d put him on hold for a minute. However, Gav – with 14% battery and sat in the dark and cold – didn’t hear from her again for nearly an hour. When the call ended, he still no confirmation that anyone would be coming out to fit him a new meter.
With just 4% battery left, he then received a call at 9pm from Morrisons. This finally confirmed they were sending an engineer out to install one – which thankfully, they did.
Forced to fight for power
However, all told, for over nine hours, E.ON had left a disabled customer without power. It had cancelled multiple meter fittings – forcing Gav to fight for hours on phone calls to get the company to take responsibility.
Gav noted that many chronically ill and disabled people in a similar situation would not be able to do this. For Gav, it had exacerbated excruciating chronic pain and ramped up his mental health. He told the Canary how:
When one is bad, it hits all the others as well. So when I’m in pain, it hits my mental health. And when my mental health is down, my pain is worse. Faced with this situation, it just basically multiplied everything.
Something that I use very often for pain relief – I’ll run a really really hot bath and then lay in the bath for half an hour. And that helps with the pain sometimes – and obviously I couldn’t do that.
To make matters worse, when the engineer turned up, he explained to Gav how the repeated cancellations was a common problem. Gav paraphrased the conversation they’d exchanged. The engineer had told him:
‘Yes E.ON like to do that. They like to book you in for your meter but then if it’s after hours, what they’ll do is they’ll cancel it, because they don’t want to pay the extra money for out of hours for fixing things’.
Ultimately then, if Gav hadn’t persevered, it’s clear E.ON would have left him without power overnight.
His battle to get E.ON to take action also underscored that while Gav is on the priority register as a disabled customer, he’d had no way to reach out via any sort of dedicated call line. It both meant Gav had to wait on the regular customer service line, but also that call handlers were ignorant of his specific needs as a disabled customer.
Overall, E.ON seemed to be prioritising cost-savings over the safety of a vulnerable disabled customer.
Long-term impacts of E.ON’s disgraceful actions
Gav said that the impacts of E.ON’s abysmal treatment for him had extended far beyond the day itself.
For one, there were direct material losses for Gav going the day without power. Gav has weight retention problems and relies on weight gain milkshakes from his pharmacy to maintain body weight. Since he has to refrigerate these, he lost an entire month’s supply. Not only was this costly for Gav financially, but this also had implications for his health. He said:
Because I had to throw that month’s supply out, I then had to wait seven days before I could get that again. And I lost nearly a stone in weight because I didn’t have my medication.
In multiple calls since the incident, E.ON customer service and complaints handlers have continued to gaslight Gav over the events of the day. E.ON has insisted that Gav communicated to its customer service employee that there was a red light on his meter display. According to E.ON, this would indicate that the problem was not with the meter, but the power going into it from UK Power Network’s lines.
However, Gav had been certain he’d never said this – because it simply wasn’t the case. Gav expressed how E.ON had made him question his own account of events, making him feel like it might have been his fault:
The way that they’ve gaslit me is very similar to how the hospital has treated me, with telling me there’s nothing wrong with me for twenty years, for then – me to find out this year that there’s a very serious problem.
However, call recordings Gav obtained via a Subject Access Request (SAR) confirmed what Gav had known all along – but E.ON had made him doubt. He’d made no mention of a red light on the meter: the problem lay with E.ON.
In short, the false claim from successive E.ON employees seemed a deliberate manoeuvre to cover its back.
Gav detailed how the entire situation had made him feel “so helpless” because he “had nothing”, noting that:
If it wasn’t for the UK Power Networks buying me a McDonald’s and a cup of tea, I wouldn’t have eaten all day. I couldn’t open my fridge because I couldn’t risk the fridge losing temperature. Even though I had to throw away all my weight gain milkshakes, I couldn’t risk it. But then I couldn’t make a cup of tea anyway, because there was no electric.
As a result, it has had a huge impact on his mental health as well:
When it got to like seven, eight o’clock and it was pitch black, I was resigned, given up. It made me realise just how vulnerable in some situations that I can be. And that’s also had a knock-on effect as well because it has kind of sparked the post-traumatic stress, and brought the anxiety back.
Compensation falling far short of the harm
Gav put in a complaint – but the process itself has been another arduous aspect of the whole ordeal.
Initially, E.ON offered him just £50 compensation, which he told the Canary, didn’t even come close to covering the cost of his spoiled weight medication. Another staff member then told him it could offer only £30 – which Gav immediately called out.
Gav also expressed his frustration that he was put through to outsourced overseas call centres multiple times, rather than the direct UK complaints handlers. The staff he spoke to were regularly unfamiliar with his complaint, resulting in him recounting it numerous times.
He explained to the Canary that his complaints handler would often not reply to him “for days”, and would make various excuses about her not being in the office. He expressed how it felt like they were purposely drawing out the process:
they were, like, just longing me off. They’ve been longing me off and longing me off.
Eventually, E.ON gave him £100 in compensation, which just covered his weight gain milkshakes. But Gav felt it fell far short of making amends for the long-term harm E.ON’s appalling treatment had caused to him.
The repeated calls alone have taken countless hours away from his work and time better spent managing his health. And it has all been at a time when Gav is anxiously anticipating appointments for major surgeries. He said that:
I’m awaiting hospital treatment. I’m awaiting operation on my spine and I’m awaiting operation on my ulnar nerve in my elbow. And those things could be happening tomorrow.
More E.ON failures
However, this also wasn’t the end of it. The installation of the new smart meter has precipitated its own series of issues since. Gav had wanted to remain on a prepayment meter, so he could top-up as needed. However, the emergency meter fitting denied him the choice, since it only had smart meters available.
For the first couple of weeks, it operated in ‘dumb mode’, so wasn’t sending readings to his energy supplier. But in March, E.ON ‘smartified’ the meter. Gav said that this was when another problem started:
I was getting all these bill statements, because at one point I was getting like these weird, crazy bills going all over the place. I was like, how can this be right? And there’s like pluses and minuses all over, and I could make no head, no tail of it. And it took me months to get to the bottom of this.
After speaking to “loads of people”, one staff member eventually pinpointed the problem:
He said, ‘I know what’s going on here. You’ve switched over to the pay monthly, but your meter is still on Morrison’s account as a prepayment meter because they haven’t been told’. So what’s happening is every time that Morrisons read my meter, it’s generating me a bill statement.
Every time that my smart meter is sending a reading back, it’s generating me a bill statement. So I’m getting all these crazy bills and none of it makes sense because the system’s broken.
It meant that it was only in June that Gav finally received an accurate bill. This is despite the fact E.ON had arranged the meter fitting in February. Of course, it has all only compounded the stress and anxiety for Gav. And once again, E.ON had put the onus on him to pursue the problem.
Profits above disabled customers safety
The Canary contacted E.ON to offer it the right to respond to the claims. The company came back contesting a number of points in Gav’s account, but chose not to provide a comment.
Ultimately, that an energy company can leave a disabled person in the dark and cold, and without access to their medications and pain management aids, and with no means to call for help, is an absolute scandal. Yet this is very nearly what E.ON did. It shows how even in an emergency, ‘priority customer’ seems hardly worth the paper it’s written on.
Of course, the whole saga is a damning indictment for a major energy supplier. It displays E.ON’s complete and utter disregard for the safeguarding of its disabled customers.
However, this, from the disaster capitalist privatised energy sector is also not surprising. Pandemic price-gouging, and extortionate charges at the mere whiff of conflict-induced oil and gas cost surges have been a fixture of the unaffordable state of energy bills during the so-called cost of living crisis – with poor and disabled customers bearing the brunt of its rank profiteering.
Moreover, Gav’s experience sits in a long despicable tradition of energy corporations preying on poor, chronically ill, and disabled customers. Energy companies have a despicable record of breaking into their homes to force them onto prepayment meters. They cut off power to chronically ill and disabled households despite the immense dangers this poses to their health.
A broken-beyond-repair energy system
In short, this appalling sidelining is nothing new. However, what Gav’s story underscores is that it all sits inside a broader culture of ableism. And this is coming at an inexcusable risk to chronically ill and disabled people in numerous situations. Failings like this cannot simply be brushed under the rug of occasional mistakes or poor customer service.
There’s a systemic nature to all this. It’s evidenced in the repeated meter cancellations, the lack of a dedicated helpline for priority register customers, and the simple fact the onus is on the customer to fight the company to ensure it doesn’t leave them in the dark and cold without power.
At the end of the day, not a single disabled customer should be made to battle for their basic energy needs to be met. It’s a rotten, broken-beyond-repair energy system that lets billion-pound corporations get away with prioritising profits above disabled people’s lives.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.