Grayson Perry challenges electricity bill rise from £300 to £39,000 a month

One is a Turner prize-winning artist, the other is a well-known journalist and broadcaster but both have been brought together by a seemingly evergreen gripe – inordinate energy bills.

Grayson Perry, known for his ceramic vases and tapestries, revealed on X on Monday he had been stung with a £39,000 a month electricity bill – an astronomical leap from the previous charge of £300 a month.

“Hi @edfenergy I’ve been trying to speak to someone to explain how my electricity bill went from £300 a month to £39,000,” he wrote. “Your call centre has been no help but you tried to direct debit this amount today from my account.”

But it seems he is not alone. Jon Sopel, who reported for the BBC for nearly 40 years before launching The News Agents podcast with fellow former BBC presenter Emily Maitlis, replied to Perry on the social media site to reveal he too had been landed with a jaw-dropping bill.

“Same has just happened to us,” Sopel wrote. “Ridiculous. We’ve now sorted. They wanted to raise ours from £152 to £18k. Wonder how many others have had this. @edfenergy – can you shed light please on what is happening.”

The supplier in both cases, EDF, insisted the two incidents were “not related in any way” and there was no “wider issue”.

A statement said: “Customers do not need to worry – these are not related to a wider issue with our billing system and we’ve not made any changes to how we process direct debit changes for customers. Unusual changes to direct debit amounts can sometimes occur when there is an erroneous meter reading recorded on the system.

“We have robust interventions in place to ensure that any large increases in customers’ direct debits are verified through a human check and in almost all such cases, system errors are rectified and prevented, without customers being impacted.”