Hi Sillyboots Firstly full disclosure, I am a former BG employee. The issue you raised is a fairly common one especially when dealing with flats/appartments called Cross Metering. When you reported it the matter would have been passed to a senior member of staff for investigation and correction, this can take up to 28 days. Hopefully if they are doing their job properly (doubtful) they would keep in touch with you. When this is all cleared up you should state you wish to raise a CAIS dispute, CAIS is a term used for debt cases. And that a Notice of Correction should be placed on your credit record, it would be wise for you to get a copy of your credit record and check for discrepancies. If you are not happy then get a copy of the BG complaints procedures, pass over the internal complaints (lets face it you have given them every chance) and take up the matter with Consumer Focus. BG are an OK company, the issue you and lots of other customers face and one of the reasons I left is a lot of staff are thick, forget what they learnt in training, too stupid to ask for help and often mis-inform customers and try to cover their asses. Good luck

A few years back I lived in a rented house which had prepay electric and gas meters already installed. As its a bit of a nuisance to get these changed I left them in. A few years after I moved out of that house I got a call from my mum saying I had received a letter from Wescot Debt collection agency about a unpaid BG bill. I remember receiving these bills as I had my mail redirected and I was always on the the phone to BG "customer service" and always got the reply that they know that I was on prepaid and it was just an error and to ignore it. How Wescot traced me to my mum's house is beyond me as I had never lived there, they just got lucky I guess but I think sending a letter out blind like that may have infringed some of my Data Protection rights. So after 6 months of arguments between Wescot, BG and myself, December 2005, the matter got sorted....or so I thought. Three montsh ago my wife and I were buying a new house, part of the process being a credit check. Our financial advisor informed us that the product we had been offered was no longer available to us due to a defualt on my credit record. I was livid when he said this. So I contacted Experian for my credit file and there it was my default , lodged by Wescot. I know I can get this cleared off my record but can I take any action aginst the two companies involved for wrongfully damaging my credit rating and costing us extra fee's for our financial advisor and having to get a more expensive mortgage?

My wife and I are soon to be in the position that we want to start chasing Lloyds for excessive charges/redemption penalties. Before we start we would appreciate any help. Our main queries surround my wife's Lloyds Credit Card. For the past 12 months she has been getting hit with late charges as she always pays on the due date but because it take them a few days to process it we get the £12 charge. We understand that when we claim that it will be for the excessive nature of the charge and not the charge itself but what really annoys us is that we bank with Lloyds and wrongly assumed that because we have a current account with the people who gave us a credit card whne we transfer funds from our current account to make a payment it should be done straight away after all there are no other parties involved, but it transpires that it take anywhere between 2-4 days to move - what a joke. We also took out an unsecured loan with Lloyds last June to clear our C/C and O/D. We are now in a position to clear this loan off early and have asked for a final settlement figure, which they have given us and have slapped on a £240 redemption charge, surely this can't be right. WE have asked for the settlement figure to be sent in writing so that we can give it to the other bank to clear our loan but have been told it will take 7-10 days, which conveniently means they will grab another £450 months payment off us. We are considering cancelling our D/D for this payment as a screw you gesture. Obviously if/when we pay this months payment it will mean a different settlement figure?? So what do you reckon the chances are of them going 'oops guys, our bad, heres that couple of quid we owe you' without us having to send in a barrage of letters? We are due to emigrate and will be cancelling our accounts with Lloyds, previously the fera of them cancelling our accounts for us is what has stopped us chasing them in the past. Any advice would be greatly appreciated and if you could direct me to the relevant threads/letter templates that would be great. Thnx:smile:

My wife and I bought our house a few years ago on a 50/50 scheme with a local housing association, we own 50% and pay rent to the housing association. Lately a few things have came to our attention thatwe would really appreciate advice on. 1. Periodically we get letters from them saying that our rent is in arrears even though we have never missed a payment. They claim that because we pay monthly (like most other tenants in the world does) but thry charge weekly rent that we end up in arrears. 2. WE own 50% of our house yet our next door neighbour who owns 25% pays only £10 per month less in rent than us and our best friends who also own 50% of their property pay about £20 per month less. Any attempts to contact this company results in having a converstaion with some worthless individual who has the Iq of a dung beetle. 3. We recently went to remortgage our share to convert the loft and add a conservatory but the remortgage feel through at the last minute as this housing association objected to it. In a 50/50 arrangment how come one party has more control than the other?

Firstly cazza let me say how sorry I am to hear of your awful treatment, hope you and the little one are doing good now. Sadly, you are not the first and you certainly will not be the last mum to be to endure this. But this is indicative of the state of decline our NHS is in and it seems the speciality of maternity services is suffering the worst. I agree with catscradle your treatment was shoddy to say the least and I am pretty certain that your nursing staff braeched several clauses in the NMC Code of Professional conduct. Maternity services have gone down the pan, plain and simple.NHS bureaucrats seem to push more and more mums into home delivery simply because they do not have the resources to care for them as in-patients. And the fact that maternity wards are dangerously understaffed and the midwives are grossly underpaid doesn't help as it means our midwives are more stressed and prone to outbursts such as you experienced. But that is no excuse for your treatment. I am actually a trained midwife (male midwife to be exact) though I have long since left the profession. When I graduated in the early 90's in N.Ireland there over a dozen maternity units to serve a population of just over 1million people, now there are 6. Midwives spend at least 5 years training to hopefully get a job that pays half as much as a train driver. The workload of a midwife is twice as much as a general nurse having to care for the mum and the new born. It is for reasons such as this that I left and 75% of my graduating class left the profession. Sadly the state of materenity services is now a great advertisement for contraception - don't get pregnant or you'll end up in a ward like that!! But sorry I got on my own little rant there. simple fact is the NHS needs rescued and restored to the once great establishment it was. I feel writing to your MP will be a waste of time as they are worthless (their salary and bonuses could easily pay for 6 nurses!) and the PALS service are not much help either. But you should never been made to suffer because of all of this. On a lighter note, I fondly remember my first ward sister, a fiercesome German woman who made all the patients get up at 7am and had them all making their beds, even the post C-sections, she was scary. She often wondered why there wre so few births during her shift -simple the babies were too scared to come out!! Keep well.

Over 3 years ago my mum got a contract phone via Phonebox Direct, one of the little perks they offered was 3 months free insurance. Her 12 month contract came and went and she went for another phone again with the same company and again the 3 month free insurance was given. To cut to the chase, 3 months ago she asked me the look into a couple of direct debits that had been coming out of her account since August 2004, she didn't know what it was so I just said to cancel it and if its important the company will get in touch with you. True enopugh several weeks later a company called CityMain wrote to her saying that 'because she has let her premiums lapse they have cancelled her insurance policy with them'. She actually received two of these letters for different policies. What has happened is that for 12 months she was paying for insurance for phone 1 and then when she got a new phone she was paying for phone 1 and 2, this continued on for over two years costing her over £200! I have written to the companies involved asking how they can do this. I know that she didn't sign up for insurance as I was the phone who ordered the phone for her online and I read all the terms and conditions and nowhere does it state that after your 3 months free you are locked with them to the ends of time! Surely if you are offered something on a free trial which essentially is what that offer is you should be given the option of continuing with it. I mean you don't take a car for a test drive only to get back to the showroom to find the salesman has taken the money out of your wallet. Also should she not have signed some sort of policy agreement after all insurance is a financial product. And how can they start up a new policy for a new phone without even checking if the old one was cancelled. Yes, I know my mum was foolish to ignore this for so long, she genuinely thought the DD was from one of those 'charity muggers' (don't get me started on them!!) she signed up to. GHow can a company do this and how can I go about getting some of mothers money back fromthem or reporting them to the relevant authorities as surely this isn't legal practice.

Thnx Rory, I'll get on that straight away. It beggars belief how companies are allowed to operate like this.

I too have had similar issue with Orange. I was contacted in Jan 06 (just when my 12 months was up) asking did I want an upgrade. At the time I was quite happy with Orange and they offered me a nice new Sony Walkman phone, so I asked them would I have to sign a new contract and was told no. So my phone duly arrived and my bill for my £60 a month service plan too. I was quickly on the phone to them and was told that was the service plan I would be on the get the phone free but I can reduce it after a few months. So come June I call to reduce my plan (after racking up over 2000 rollover minutes) and was told that I was 'locked into it', but I'm not on a contract I said and was offered no explanation. So at the start of August 2006 I wrote to them giving my 30 days notice to leave their "service". September starts and I'm still with Orange, I call to find out why and am told that they did not receive my notice ( yeah right). So I duly dispatch another letter this time recorded delivery and call up two weeks later (after checking royal mail for delivery) and was told that I need to send in notice in writing! Thye claimed not to have received the second one, luckily I was able to say 'well can you ask mr suchand such in your postroom what he has done with it as he signed for it, after 15 minutes on hold (amazing that they don't have a landline number for us non-ornage customers!!)I am told that yes we have received your letter but you cannot cancel as your contract is until Jan 07. What contract I screamed? I asked was I on a new contract and was told not. So after a lot of phone calls and letters (incl. one call with a young lady who kindly informed me that I was not on a contract!!) at the start of December they said that they would as an act of goodwill for my long service terminate my contract and sent me a bill for £229.29 (incl. a £10.61 discount off my Decembers line rental!!). I (foolishly) dug in my heels and refused to pay until they provided me with proof of a contract and I also felt I was being charged for 3 months line rental unfairly and I actually didn't use the service. So I then endure countless phone calls and letters from the Orange Collections dept demanding payment. Until Jan07 when they send in the big boys Moorcroft Debt Recovery (don't even get me started). So on the advice of my solicitor to prevent any damage to my credit file and until we pursue the matter legally I pay up. So in Feb I battle thro' the Orange phone system ( you think its hard speaking to them when you are a customer try speaking when you're not) and give my cc details and pay up £229.29, thinking this would be the last. Alas no, here we are in JUne and I am still getting the threats. Firstly I was supposed to pay Moorcroft (no chance will I ever send a penny to those animals) secondly Orange can't seem to find my payment (whoopsie). I have sent both companies my credit card statement showing 19th Feb £229.29 going out but still it goes on. Please can someone offer some advice? How can Orange (or any other company) get away with this.

First post so Hi guys. A couple of months ago I started getting letters to my house that were addressed to my mum from Connaught Collections about a debt of near 2 grand, my mum knows nothing of this. So after a lot of letters CC said that its not us but 1st Credit that the debts with (basically thats their big brother) and thats 1st Credit sent them a letter from the Consumer Credit Counselling Service about a payment plan for this debt. My mum swears blind she does not know anything about this. Connaught say that i have to stop bothering them and direct my queries to 1st Credit. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. oh yes here is the sting in the tail, I live in England and my mum is in N.Ireland, why are they sending letters to my house, the only reason I can think of is that for a few months last year my mum came to live with us as my wife was quite poorly after giving birth (both are great now:-) )

First post so Hi guys. A couple of months ago I started getting letters to my house that were addressed to my mum from Connaught Collections about a debt of near 2 grand, my mum knows nothing of this. So after a lot of letters CC said that its not us but 1st Credit that the debts with (basically thats their big brother) and thats 1st Credit sent them a letter from the Consumer Credit Counselling Service about a payment plan for this debt. My mum swears blind she does not know anything about this. Connaught say that i have to stop bothering them and direct my queries to 1st Credit. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. oh yes here is the sting in the tail, I live in England and my mum is in N.Ireland, why are they sending letters to my house, the only reason I can think of is that for a few months last year my mum came to live with us as my wife was quite poorly after giving birth (both are great now:-) )