Thousands of British Gas customers who had prepayment meters force-fitted in their homes will between them receive compensation and energy bill debt write-offs worth up to £112m in the biggest energy supplier settlement on record.

Great Britain’s energy regulator found that British Gas forced PPMs on homes that were not keeping up with their bills at the height of the Russian gas crisis, in one of the most complex investigations in Ofgem’s history.

More than three years after the scandal emerged, the watchdog has called for a redress package worth more than four times the previous largest settlement, which in late 2015 required npower to pay £26m for its customer service failings.

British Gas must pay a £20m penalty into Ofgem’s voluntary redress fund to compensate customers who suffered unfair treatment and write off debt worth up to £70m.

The supplier must also continue to provide the remainder of a £22.4m voluntary assistance package it launched in the wake of the scandal to support PPM customers.

Tim Jarvis, Ofgem’s chief executive, said: “It is clear that British Gas fell short in its treatment of an unacceptable number of vulnerable customers who had a PPM installed without consent, and it’s right that they’ve taken action to put things right. Because of our action customers will receive a substantial package of redress, compensation and debt write-off.”

Ofgem temporarily banned the practice of forcing PPMs on households that missed repeated payments on their bills after the Times reported in early 2023 that debt agents working for British Gas had ignored signs of vulnerability to fit the meters.

The regulator later found that most of Great Britain’s major energy suppliers had forced PPMs into the homes of customers as the energy cost crisis in 2022 caused many to miss payments on their bills.

Its British Gas investigation concluded about one year after a separate investigation found that ScottishPower, EDF, E.ON, Octopus Energy, Utility Warehouse, Good Energy, TruEnergy and Ecotricity had fallen short of the regulator’s standards when fitting the meters to reclaim unpaid energy debts.

The suppliers collectively agreed last May to pay 40,000 households more than £18.6m in compensation and debt write-offs on their energy bills.

“The installation of prepayment meters under warrant should only be a last resort, with rigorous checks to ensure debt is recovered lawfully, proportionately and safely,” Jarvis said.

“This investigation forms part of Ofgem’s wider work to raise standards across the energy market and strengthen consumer protections. We continue to challenge suppliers to do more to identify and support customers in difficulty and proactively offer support, and our priority remains driving lasting improvements so customers can have confidence they will be treated fairly.”

The regulator’s investigation focused on a sample of British Gas customers to identify the proportion who may have faced unfair treatment, meaning the full scale of the scandal is not known. British Gas will have a year to determine the exact number of households who are due compensation.

Martin McCluskey, the minister for energy consumers, said: “Consumers deserve an energy market they can trust. That trust was broken for too many families affected by the forced installations of prepayment meters, which was an unacceptable national scandal.”

McCluskey said the government’s energy market reforms, including plans to strengthen the energy regulator, would “help make sure injustices like these never happen again”.

Chris O’Shea, the chief executive of Centrica, which owns British Gas, said: “What happened should never have happened, and I am sorry to the prepayment customers who were affected.

“Over the last three years, we have treated this matter with the seriousness it deserves and have made changes to our practices and put safeguards in place to ensure we deliver the standards our customers have every right to expect.”

The regulator allowed suppliers to restart forced meter installations less than a year after its moratorium, although forced fittings in homes with young children or residents over the age of 75 remain banned.

Kara Young remembers the fervor around Is God Is’s off-Broadway run in 2018. Playwright Aleshea Harris’s revenge tale ran at New York’s Soho Rep theater from February through May of that year. Young was performing in a different show at the time, but she knew she needed to see Harris’s play by any means necessary.

“I was lucky to get a ticket,” says the two-time Tony award-winning actor, recalling the buzz about the show that rippled through the theater community and saw it transfer to London in 2021. As soon as she saw it, Young easily understood why: “It blew my mind. Those characters have stayed in my spirit since 2018.”

The story is just as moving and unsettling on-screen as it was on-stage. Harris adapted her Obie award-winning show into the new feature film Is God Is and makes her directorial debut with the film, too. The epic tells the story of twin sisters Racine (played by Young) and Anaia (played by Mallori Johnson). As kids, they were disfigured with burn scars after their father set their mother on fire in front of them. The girls moved through the foster system, protecting one another. Racine is the Rough One, as her character’s full name goes. She passes more easily in the world than Anaia, the Quiet One, who wears their physical trauma on her face.

They believed their mother was dead until they receive a letter from her. She’s on her deathbed now, still rendered immobile from the attempted murder. She has one request for her long-lost daughters: “Make your daddy dead.”

“There’s a mythic quality to twins,” Harris explains. Racine and Anaia move between silent and verbose conversations with one another as they wonder whether or not they possess the same capability for violence as their father. The twins felt like a natural pair of protagonists to align with the simple prompt Harris had for this play: if she were to create a Greek tragedy but with people who look and talk like her, what would that be?

“That prompt just opened a thousand doors in my mind,” she says.

Is God Is wasn’t made with the intention of being adapted, but Harris’s original play did draw inspiration from films of female rage, revenge and violence such as Kill Bill and Set It Off. After she was approached by Tessa Thompson’s Viva Maude production company and Janicza Bravo, a fellow producer, (Zola), it was at Bravo’s suggestion that Harris stepped into the director’s chair for the feature.

“There’s so much nuance inside of it and so much humor,” Harris explains. “I can’t even imagine the assignment for someone else, of trying to take this wild, wacky story and keep a hold of its tone, keep it unapologetic and keep its grimy, off-Broadway, punk roots.”

Harris accomplishes that well. The production has a rawness to it as the sisters embark on a road trip through the US south to track down the whereabouts of The Monster, as their father is called. In doing so, they piece together the years their family was apart and gain a deeper understanding of how horrifyingly scary, manipulative and unremorseful this man may be. They also begin to unpack their own capabilities and the divergent dreams the sisters have after decades of just trying to survive.

“There’s a justice around the rage to complete the mission,” Young says of Racine, who has spent her life protecting her more heavily scarred sister from the world’s cruelty. “When we crack her open, it’s really about cracking open the points of no return. It opens a portal into her deepest why.”

Anaia’s sense of rage reveals itself as a deep sense of sadness and loss. Over the course of the girls’ road trip, she’s not as certain that they should be fulfilling their mother’s request. But she still sticks by her sister’s side.

“At the end of the day, [Anaia] just wanted to be a normal girl,” says Johnson. “She just wanted a dad, she wanted a mom, she wanted a good relationship with her sister. and she wanted to feel like she belonged. That was very clear to me from the moment that I read her, but all the complexities of it became much more nuanced as we were working on it.”

Anaia and Racine’s troubled parents have brief, but staggering scenes. Playing their mother is Vivica A Fox, who starred in two of Harris’s biggest film references for Is God Is. The twins refer to their mother as God, believing she is that because she made them.

“I knew that we could call her God and people would buy it,” Harris says of getting her dream star for this role in place. “She has the larger-than-life-ness but also the grounded-ness. She trusted me and didn’t treat me like a baby film-maker.”

“I’m an independent film-maker and first-time director myself,” Fox says, referring to her 2023 directorial debut First Lady of BMF: The Tonesa Welch Story, “so I know what it’s like to be in her shoes.”

Fox recalls Harris telling her she was the first and only choice to play God. In order to transform, she had a 2.30am call time to have the prosthetics fitted all over her body.

“It was a four-hour process of getting into the prosthetics, the wigs, the nails, but it really helped me get into character,” Fox explains. Harris had made clear that God is in her final days, physically tired but excited to see the daughters she has spent years avoiding due to how deformed her entire body had become. “She’s the catalyst for sending them on this revenge mission.”

In contrast, Sterling K Brown’s sociopathic Monster is a chilling inversion of the actor’s heroic leading man image. When his face is finally shown, he masterfully channels the mysteriousness of this man’s motivation and lack of empathy. Harris’s on-screen take on the Monster was something that diverged from the play, wanting to toy with the dichotomy of Brown’s more typically gentle demeanor.

“In the script I wrote ‘he’s like Barack Obama,’” she explains. “It’s giving suburban dad. Sweet, charming, soft. To me, that’s a much more interesting choice. It’s a more layered and delicious choice. I was absolutely thinking about what people think they know about Sterling. I think Sterling had a lot of fun being subversive there, showing another side of him and getting something that was surprising.”

More importantly, the Monster in Is God Is embodies the very real type of abusers that can maintain their social status and good will in society: the ones who can play the good guy even when they’re not.

“The way people who are abusive can get away with it is their charm,” Harris adds.

But the real core of the story is the bond between the sisters. Young and Johnson expertly navigate the complexities of their co-dependence and emerging differences. The two were brought into rehearsals two weeks before filming to do exercises like looking in the mirror to see if they read each other’s minds. They lived in the same apartment and spent 24 hours a day together while filming in Louisiana.

“The core of our connection came from me and Kara being bonded in real life,” Johnson says. It added a softness to the rage, as well as a purpose for seeing through all facets of how it manifests within their relationship to one another and themselves.

“With these characters, you see all of the nuance of why we are angry in the first place, what happens when we go after it, what it does to us, what it does to the people around us, our questioning of ourselves in our rage and the quiet side of the rage,” Johnson adds. “These characters are literal embodiments of all of the nuance of what it means to be a Black woman in America and how we have to navigate ourselves in our journey for our own justice. It’s our own justification for why we deserve more and why we deserve better.”