CHARLIE SINCLAIR was stunned when he picked up his latest electricity bill for £15 - and discovered it was for a building that was demolished 20 years ago.

He had rented a building to use as a builder's yard in his home village in the mid-1980s. It was later demolished to make way for a new medical centre.

But last week he received a bill for the property for £15.03 from electricity supplier npower.

It was not until after he had written out the cheque for £15.03 that he noticed something was wrong.

He said he could barely believe it when he realised what the bill was for.

"It was a shock," he said. "It's been some time since I was there - nearly 20 years."

Mr Sinclair, 68, of Sherburn-in-Elmet, phoned npower about the blunder, which arose when the firm transferred its records to a new computer system.

Old sets of records got mixed up with more recent ones, leading to Mr Sinclair being accidentally billed.

Mr Sinclair, now retired, said he was concerned the firm may have been mistakenly billing him for years, and thought he may be due a small windfall.

But npower confirmed it was just a one-off blunder, and said Mr Sinclair had not paid anything more than he ought to.

Mr Sinclair said he always paid his bills as soon as they arrived, so he could qualify for an early-payment discount on future bills. When the latest invoice from npower arrived, he instantly filled out a cheque for the required amount.

It was only when he was looking for the address to send payment to that he noticed the supply address was for his old yard, outside the Village Centre in Sherburn-in-Elmet. Mr Sinclair leased the council-owned building for several years, before it was demolished to make way for a doctors surgery.

An npower spokeswoman said: "According to our records, Mr Sinclair's account was de-energised, but still registered to npower. We are currently migrating our business customers to a new billing system and his details were picked up during this process before all of the data was fully updated. We have now rectified this to make sure this does not happen again."

Updated: 10:19 Wednesday, June 22, 2005