ENERGY bosses have offered to slash a crippling electricity bill by 68% – but the determined ladies of Northumberland’s oldest Women’s Institute are still refusing to pay up.

Officials at npower are willing to cut the shock £5,315 bill slapped on Heddon-on-the-Wall WI to £1,693 after admitting a bungle on their back-payment demand.

But Heddon WI secretary Pauline Wright declared: “We still feel we are not responsible for any of this. We’ve paid our most recent bill and don’t see why we should pay any more.”

The conflict arose when npower discovered the five-digit meter readings that had been taken since 2006 should have been six-digit readings from old meters.

The back-payment demand came to £5,315.58 – a figure that would have “bankrupted” the 95-year-old WI branch.

After The Journal revealed the dispute on Saturday, npower said as a gesture of goodwill they would settle for only 12 months’ worth of the payment. But Mrs Wright said the committee was sticking to their guns, adding: “We are still battling to get rid of this bill completely. We do have enough funds to pay the £1,693.27 npower want, but it would make a very big hole in our funds.

“This has totally come out of the blue, and if there was a fault we should have known about it after the first year – not after six years.”

Jo Robinson, npower senior executive complaints adviser, told Mrs Wright in an email: “Previously we issued invoices based on five-digit meter readings instead of the six-digit readings your meter was actually recording.

“Upon investigation, it appears the local meter readers had a mixture of both five-and six-dial readings over recent years.

“However, only the five-dial readings had been validated for use on our invoices. This resulted in the ‘catch-up’ bill for £5,315.58.

“As we appreciate the financial impact this would have on the Women’s Institute, as a gesture of goodwill we propose to limit the period of back-billing to 12 months, thereby withdrawing any older charges. This would reduce your account balance to £1,693.27.”

Offering “sincere apologies”, npower also offered to allow payments to be spread out by direct debit over 12 or 18 months. As a “commercial organisation”, the premises is not covered by the domestic classification which limits back-billing to 12 months.

A spokesman for npower added: “We were really keen to help the WI as we don’t want to see them struggle.”

But Mrs Wright hit back: “We shouldn’t have to pay this at all – we have just correctly paid our last bill, which was £500-plus, so why should we have to pay more? We have also just paid to replace an electric wall heater and a night storage heater, so we don’t have money to spare.”

As a non-profit-making charity, Heddon WI has been in its current wooden HQ hut in Towngate, Heddon, since 1926 and now has 40 members.