Simon Read: 'Scottish Power has pledged to put things right for customers - we'll hold it to that'

Simon tackled one of the company's senior managers about the problems

Thanks for all your stories about problems with Scottish Power. I'll include details of some of the more shocking in a future issue, but this week I tackled one of the company's senior managers about the problems.

Neil Clitheroe is Scottish Power's retail and generation chief and he flew down from his office in Glasgow this week to meet me in London and try and explain what's gone wrong. Cynics might see his move as an attempt to stop the flow of negative stories, but I prefer to believe he was trying to engage with the story, rather than avoid answering my queries.

My question to Mr Clitheroe was simple: what happened to cause problems for so many people and what is the company doing to put things right? Here's what he said: "I'd like to apologise to any customers that have been impacted by this. Over the last three years we've invested £200m to improve our customer service. It meant moving all our millions of customers to a new system. For the vast majority it worked perfectly well.

"But we've had difficulty with a small number of customers. Over the last year it's been tens of thousands, but we've reduced that now to a few thousand.

"I apologise to those customers that are still having difficulties. We're identifying the ones affected and resolving complaints when they come in, and will make sure that if anyone's lost out financially, they get compensation for the issues. We will also make sure we get them onto the best tariffs for them.

"It's going to take a few more months to fix these problems for the few thousand remaining customers but we're solving more every day and over the next few months we'll have them all fixed. Anyone still feeling unhappy should contact us. Either call or email and we'll resolve your problem as quickly as we can."

We will see if the company keeps to is promises. In the meantime I'll be passing on your problems to Scottish Power and will continue to report back on progress.

s.read@independent.co.uk

twitter: @simonnread