A KEIGHLEY family spoke of their shock and disbelief after an energy company sales agent scrawled an abusive message on their home’s door when they refused to switch supplier.

Robert Bailey and his son Philip said they discovered the offensive message on their door shortly after they had finally managed to get the “extremely persistent” agent to leave their home in Oakworth Road.

Mr Bailey senior said: “We were disgusted when we saw this. I couldn’t believe it to be honest.

“We phoned up the company involved and they did get right back to us, and have been taking it seriously.”

A spokesman for Utilita Energy Limited, the firm that employed the sales agent, told the Keighley News: “We have now resolved this issue with Mr Bailey, who has accepted our apologies.

“We take accusations like this very seriously and have suspended the agent in question while we conduct an internal review.”

Mr Bailey, 63, is now retired and used to work as a bus driver in Leeds. He moved to Keighley from Bradford eight years ago.

He said the agent knocked on his home’s door one afternoon earlier this month, and had initially suggested he was only there to arrange for the family to switch to smart meters, so they would no longer have to send estimated energy readings.

However, Mr Bailey said that once the agent had got into the flat it became clear he was working for a different energy company, and wanted to persuade the household to switch from their current supplier – British Gas.

Mr Bailey said: “It turned out that he had nothing to do with British Gas, and was just trying to get us to switch.

“I’ve got my wits about me, but some elderly people are very vulnerable and they would have signed up just to get rid of him.

“People need to be made aware of this kind of thing. The man went on and on and it took us about 10 minutes to get him out of the flat.

“He just kept talking and we had to shut the door on him in the end.

“My young grand daughter was there and didn’t understand what was happening. She was quite distressed that this man wouldn’t leave.”

Philip Bailey, 32, said: “He kept giving us a lot of spiel about how we were paying more with British Gas, even when we said we weren’t interested.

“It was typical salesman talk, but very aggressive and ‘in your face’ as well.

“He never showed us his ID, and we could only tell what company he was from because we could see it on his lanyard.

“Since we contacted them about it Utilita have been very, very good about it, but I am concerned that someone like that was working for them.”

He said the agent left the flat at about 3.30pm, and the family spotted the abuse written on their door in biro about half an hour later, when they were about to leave their flat.

He said it was immediately obvious who was responsible, because the message explicitly attacked them for being “British Gas customers” – something no one else would have known about.