ENERGY companies are still relying on closed magistrates’ court hearings to secure warrants against households with unpaid bills, more than three years after the pre-payment meter scandal.Magistrates are still sitting in private to authorise forced entry, often approving hundreds of warrants at a time based on applications they have never personally reviewed, an investigation by the Standard newspaper revealed yesterday.
This is about debt-collection for unpaid bills. According to the article, it’s clearly a broken system that punishes the most vulnerable in society, but still, the headline is an inflammatory (and clickbait) way to present that.
Uh, no, the headline pretty straightforwardly describes what is happening. These are private firms, they should frankly have zero recourse other than simply not doing business with that customer again and reporting to other private firms that track credit scores.