A SECOND Bolton family was left in the cold after problems with a pre-payment gas card.

From Sunday lunchtime until Tuesday afternoon, Kathleen Williams and her three young children were left shivering, unable to turn on the gas heating or cook a meal during one of the coldest snaps of the winter.

British Gas claim the consumer caused the problem herself by trying to re-charge an old card when she lost her new one. But she has angrily denied that.

As reported in the BEN last month, Bolton MP Brian Iddon questioned British Gas chief executive Roy Gardner about "loopholes" in its emergency service after Joanne Hill and her partner Andrew Kelly from Little Lever were left in the same predicament over a weekend.

Mr Iddon slammed the three-page reply from the chief executive as "waffle" and after hearing Kathleen's story promised to take up the issue with the chief executive again.

Mr Iddon is calling for a total "re-think of the amount of emergency supply" given to card holding customers. In his view it should be increased up to at least £5.

Kathleen, of Hillside Avenue, Farnworth, opted for the pre-payment card system after experiencing problems with the key system of payment.

On Sunday she realised she had just 29p of gas left on her card - which electronically tells the meter how much gas has been paid for - and took it to the local shop to be "recharged".

The transaction appeared to have gone as usual, and the shop accepted her £3. But when Kathleen returned home she was horrified to discover the card was giving a "nil" reading on the meter.

She took the card back to the shop where a message of "faulty" came up on the machine.

Refunded

Kathleen was refunded her £3 but when she tried to recharge the card at other local shops, it would not accept the top-up.

Distraught, Kathleen, 27, rang British Gas to see if they could put more emergency gas on the card. But she says they refused.

She rang British Gas again on Monday and was told a new card would be sent to her, and would arrive the following morning. But on Tuesday, Kathleen and her children Siobhan, eight, Joshua, six and 17-month-old Leon, who suffers from asthma, were still in the cold.

"I wouldn't mind if it was my fault," she stormed. "But it's the fault of the card.

"We had to cook at a neighbour's. Poor little Leon's chest was really suffering and he was finding it difficult to breath."

She said she was so concerned about her children she contacted her health visitor.

Kathleen contacted British Gas again on Tuesday to inform them that the new initialised card had not arrived. They promised to send a blank card out, and that reached her yesterday.

A spokesman for British Gas said that after being told of Kathleen's problems by the BEN, they acted immediately.

He said that it would appear that Kathleen had lost her card and had tried to use an old one. "But it doesn't work like that," he said.

British Gas had also agreed to give Kathleen £5 credit.

The letter to Mr Iddon read: "At British Gas we are constantly reviewing our wide range of payment methods to better meet customers' needs. As part of this continual review, we are currently in the process of trialling a new pre-payment meter system, which would enable customers to obtain a replacement card from a local outlet themselves, should the need arise."

He went on to say that should the trials prove successful, the system would be available later this year.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.