I get £110.85 a week, but have to pay shortfalls on rent and council tax.

Well, I am appealing being in this group to start with anyway. I suffer with ADHD, apparently this lifelong condition will improve in 6 months, yet I've had it since birth. Obviously the people at ATOS have no experience in mental health conditions and assume that a person will get better even though they said on my medical report that I have a "Significant mental disability". After 6 months they re-assessed me. I was taken off my medication and things are a lot worse now because I have a heart problem caused by taking Methylphenidate. I feel so angry at being treated like this. I am currently awaiting a letter from the appeals service about being placed in the wrong group. Perhaps I can include the cold weather payments in my appeal, because I will be doing so. If they decide that I should be in the support group anything I should have been entitled to (in theory) should be given back to me.

Hi there, I live in Bradford, West Yorkshire. My Incapacity benefit claim was transferred to Employment and Support Allowance (WRA) in October 2012. I know 2 other people who are on ESA who have received 4 cold weather payments this year but they are on the income related side of this benefit. After speaking to the DWP, their stance is that although other people on those other claims receive exactly the same amount of money, I do not qualify for any cold weather payments. The extra money that they do pay me as part of contribution based ESA is gobbled up by Rent and Council Tax shortfalls because of the level of income I have at the moment. Now doesn't this just sound crazy, I earn the same as those that qualify, the councils force me to pay a shortfall because my level of income, and yet I don't qualify for cold weather payments. If anything I actually earn less than those other people, and with mounting fuel usage this year because of cold weather I'm in even more financial hardship than I need to be. Does anybody know of a way that I might be able to get these payments? Is there some sort of department or complaint that can be raised in relation to this? Any help would be great, thanks.

Heh... Just checked my account at 10pm tonight (10th July 2011), my money was paid into my account! So I paid off my overdrawn balance, but guess what! It showed the credit as taken place on the 11th July 2011!!! AFTER the Debit Card transaction that sent me overdrawn.... AFTER!!!? SERIOUSLY!? So we are left with a catch 22 scenario. My account balance was shown as overdrawn on Sunday morning on the 10th July 2011. The transaction that sent me overdrawn has the date of 11th July 2011, which for those checking their calendars is TOMORROW. My other santander account is credited today (10th July 2011) at 10pm, I transferred the money to pay off the overdrawn balance. And the credit appears as being received by this account on the 11th July 2011, this is after the transaction that put my account overdrawn tomorrow. So the fact still remains, I have been overdrawn and nothing I could have done will ever erase that fact. I sit here now contemplating the fees that my happy bank manager will be requesting in response to this, and I am now contemplating why I even bothered getting an account with santander if this is how their system works.... However, now I have the ammunition to throw at santander to argue the toss. The following points being: A. The debit card transaction that puts me overdrawn dosen't happen until monday. B. The credit to the account which is in the same queue will not happen until monday. Therefore logic suggests, the account will only be overdrawn for a extremely tiny amount of time, possibly microseconds or minutes. I do not beleive in my good conscience that £30.00 is worth this amount of time that the account was overdrawn. I'll just have to speak to them tomorrow and iron this out with them.

Okay okay! I get it, I shouldn't use my card in such a manner and I won't be doing so again. I'll just have to call them and act dumb and say as I'm a new customer could you please waive this fee as a one off and it will never happen again. If I do really get desperate for money I know that a transaction that I complete on a Sunday can never send my account overdrawn and is a much safer way of borrowing without paying fees. However Friday night is a big NO NO, and so is saturday because they are still open and it could bite me on the rear. If I have to pay £30, then I'll take it that this bank dosen't play nice with it's customers, transfer to another one that does. Anybody have any suggestions on banks that are performing extra great this year? Thanks for all your advice! Ps: I read somewhere that the difference between online and offline debit cards is that if you use an online debit card, the bank checks your balance before they authorise a transaction. Therefore you cannot go overdrawn. With an offline debit card like your major debit cards like visa, there is a floor limit. Meaning the bank will authorise any transaction within that limit and they will only mark down on your available balance what has been spent. The actual transaction does not appear on your statement for 2 to 3 days, and if you pay money into the account before the transaction appears you never go overdrawn. In this case santander placed it on the account 1 day before it actually left, and sent me overdrawn. Not playing by the rules santander! BAD! BAD! *hits santander on the head with a rolled up newspaper*

No I disagree. When a person uses an offline debit card, like in my case where I used a Visa Debit card. The bank does not check the balance of the account before deciding to authorize a transaction. The bank however only places these funds on hold, which would reflect on my available balance. In this case the transaction placed my available balance as -£7.39, this stays on hold until Tesco decides to complete the transaction at their end. Only today the actual balance was made into -£7.39 because they placed the transaction on my statement. Regardless if Tesco have actually claimed the funds, because if they did then it would appear on my statement as today. In effect this is fraudulant, as in essence the money has not left the account yet. Therefore I am not overdrawn. Therefore they have no legal right to take an unarranged overdraft fee for something which has not yet left my account. Does this make sense? I am complaining about the fact that the transaction has appeared on my statement and impacted my actual "current" balance, meaning today/now on the 10th July 2010. When the transaction date on my statement, the actual date the the money has left my account has not come to pass yet, this date is the 11th July 2010. This is very underhand business practice in an attempt to charge me an unarranged overdraft, and I'm not letting them get away with it. I have read their terms and conditions, they state that if a transaction below £10 is charged to my account and the account is overdrawn by 1 day then they charge me a £30 unarranged overdraft fee. As the money will be paid back before the close of business on monday, actually to be specific the money will be paid back before business even starts. As it's my intention to repay this as soon as electronically possible, meaning I click transfer when I log on in the early hours and it hits their account. They are only going to be out of pocket like 1-2 minutes from the time the debit card transaction left to the time my money comes in. This by their terms and conditions does not fall into the time frame of "1 Day", it falls into my category of "2 Minutes". Sorry for ranting on like this, but I hate to loose money in such a underhand way, and I will errect a brick wall in defence of this kind of operating by banks. Does anybody actually agree with my way of thinking?

Hi, I got this Everyday Current account from santander a couple of months back. And I found that if I spent money on my debit card on a weekend, then my wages that are paid in on a monday would cover it and I would not get into an unarranged overdraft. Problem being, this time I spent something on friday night. I logged in this morning at 1.17am (10/07/2011) and to my horror my balance shows -7.39! On my statement it reads: Date: 11/07/2011 Description: CARD PAYMENT TO TESCO STORES SACAT, 7.40 GBP ON 08-07-2011 Money out: £7.40 Balance: -£7.39 HANG ON, HANG ON SANTANDER!!!! This transaction has not happened yet! The date of this transaction is Monday 11th July 2011! How can they justify putting me overdrawn when the transaction in question has not happened yet? The account will be credited when my money goes in on monday and therefore my account would never have gone overdrawn to begin with. Do santander have the right to charge me an unarranged overdraft fee if the transaction that put me overdrawn has not happened yet? If anybody reads this today, please give me some help in answering all of this, thanks!

I've sent that private message to you regarding the identity of the housing association. I just got another e-mail from them saying: "The Woolf protocal allows their insurers 21 days to acknowledge the claim and a further 3 months to investigate prior to a decision on liability being made". He also added that "at that point they might ask for medical records and the like". Looks like I'll have to get onto my doctor and ask for medical records, although I did read up online that all my out of pocket expenses can be reimbursed by my landlord, but at what point I'm not sure. Feel free to comment on my progress, I have a general idea on what needs to be done, but there might be a few things that I've overlooked. I know I'll need my medical records to prove that my astma started around the time I reported the mould, and a list of prescriptions to date showing medication used to control it. I'm not sure if it's worth appointing a surveyor to check for damp, because the housing association has already completed repairs. They've done the work so there is no evidence left to prove that they did the work, except where they stripped the wallpaper off. I also pulled a copy of the repairs that they completed off the website. So do you think there is something I have missed? Also on the point of that window in the bathroom, the electrition that installed the fans said that it would be a waste of time, as soon as steam hits a cold surface it results in condensation to form. He first refused to install the fans, something about the really high ceilings and lack of ventillation. The fans only suck the air out of the bathroom, if there is no airflow then it would not work effectively. There is no window in the bathroom, just a glass window that dosen't open. There is also a door on the outside that has been sealed off, as at some point people could enter through the bathroom or at an older time when it wasn't my premises. Surveyors have commented that the door really does need ceiling off properly. It's been done completely wrong they said.

I'm not actually sure I should give their name as if their insurance company is looking into this, I shouldn't be bad mouthing the housing association prematurely. I will update this post when I start receiving correspondance from the insurance company, so people can comment and help as the process gets underway. Many thanks for your comments so far!

Hi there! I have been living with a social housing assocation for the last 7 years on a secure tenancy, and during my tenancy I have had several issues with damp and mould over the years. On the first occasion I took photographs of the damage and did the complaints procedure and even spoke to the housing ombudsmen when the housing association was being a bit difficult. That first case was settled with damages paid to me for redecoration allowances and having to be moved to another property whilst the work had been carried out. It turns out that during the winter months, the external wall was allowing damp to seep in. So when I tried to redecorate, all the plaster came off the walls and the premises could never be heated up by the central heating, the heat was bleeding out of the walls. A few years later I am back to square one, damp has returned and mould had spread. Only this time the association had to carry out inspections and dragged the whole process on about 94 weeks. They first inspected the mould and damp on the 4th November 2008, then on the 5th January 2009 and finally on the 31st March 2010. I had to start a complaints procedure to get them to complete the mould treatments and complete their obligations as a landlord. But I seem to have hit a brick wall and I need a little help on how to proceed. The level 1 response stated that I was responsible for the mould because the time when he visited on the 31st March 2010, my house was a little untidy. So he's flouting "Scruffy Tenant" to try and justify his theory that the damp was primarily caused by ventilation and the moul was something to do with me. He ignored the fact that the gutter had overflowed and caused water to seep through my wall. My neighbour upstairs had a leak in his bathroom and water was flooding through my ceiling and I had to mop it up every other day, and ventellation in my bathroom and water coming from outside during rain storms pretty much finished off my bathroom. I have claimed for ill health during this procedure because of the length of time it took them to get the work done eventually. Basically I used to suffer with astma as a child and it suddenly came back without warning when the Black mould appeared and I had to use inhalers to bring my breathing under control. I could hardly breath when in the heaviest affected areas and I had a miserable time of the whole experience. So the landlord has repaired the guttering, they've repaired the leak upstairs, done the mould treatments and installed new fans to deal with ventillation in my bathroom. But hang on a minute, if lack of ventilation and mould was my fault, why install stronger fans eh? They've refused to install a window in the bathroom which would improve things considerably, but their reinvestment department says that I'm not allowed one. So, what's my problem... Well, my problem is that I have elevated this complaint to level 2 and my landlord has now decided to get an insurance company to handle a "Disrepair Claim". I'm not sure how to proceed with this, they've totally derailed the complaints process and are adding more delays to settlement in order to bring in a third party insurer to help minimize their mess. So what do I do now? What should I expect from all this? I am getting a bit sick of the assocation whitewashing stuff to minimize their outgoings, but what infuriates me more is that last time I was told that this problem wouldn't return, and here I am again suffering the same old problems after they repaired the damage last time. I would apprecate some help if anybody has experienced this before or have come across insurers dealing with complaints. Feel free to ask any questions before giving advice, Thanks! Kind Regards, Graham.

Turns out that they did squeeze that bit of information into my bill, I'm online billing so it's difficult to notice these things unless you download the pdf file and actually read it properly. I just read overview on my screen, the part that lists your charges etc for that period. I think the way they operate stinks and they need to have some automated system set up that either writes to the customer or e-mails them with a brief note. "Hi, it's BT here... sorry, but your montly payment amount is going up by £83.50, let's see if you have a merry christmas... HO HO HO! We definately will!" I suppose with every organisation, they rely heavily on people not noticing the obscure footnotes, those late payment charges and reconnection fees buy the bubbly at the shareholders christmas banquets.

Partners mobile phone call usage. Basically, I've had a massive arguement over this. But I thought BT could only increase your monthly payment direct debit with 14 days notice or something along those lines. I haven't received a single letter or e-mail advising me of an increase. I'm thinking I should have just let it go through, get the bank charges and open a complaint about the amount being changed without a scrap of written notification. But they'd probably fob me off with (it's your duty to monitor your usage). Bleh : I had this last time, nobody would accept fault. BT increased the amount without first writing to me or e-mailing me with an intent to increase the monthly amount by so many £ per month. It went through to the bank, the bank knocked it back saying "Not enough funds" and I got a £35 bank charge. I contacted BT and kicked off, saying you didn't inform me of an increase. BT said, it's not our fault... you should have been keeping an eye on it yourself. The bank said they couldn't reverse the bank charges as they can only credit money back that has been taken. As there was no funds there for BT to take, then they couldn't credit any money back. Nobody accepted liability for the mistake and I was left with £35 bank charges and I was forced to cancel my direct debit to prevent BT representing their Direct Debit again.

I'm wondering if this has happened to anybody else? I logged into my BT account on the 09/12/2009, only to find that BT had increased my monthly direct debit from £31.00 per month to £114.50 per month. I was shocked at this and attempted to edit my payment agreement online to make it less. Unfortunately, they set the edit options as unavailable and gave me little or no choice but to cancel my direct debit. I'm sick of BT doing this, they put up the amount, if I didn't check it then I would have gotten a failed direct debit charge with my bank at Halifax and would have to pay an additional charge of £35.00 So, during my negotiations today with a live agent... They basically said that I had to pay half the bill by the 01/01/2010, if I didn't then I would get my line restricted and get my Broadband cut off (Currently with Be Broadband). They forced me into a corner and I finally agreed that I could be hard pushed to afford £150 on the 11/01/2010 and would have to pay £67.00 every month thereafter. I think it's silly that they get away with murder, asking people with limited income to stump up an increase from £31 to £114.50 in such a short period of time and it's Christmas! Does anybody have advice where I stand and whether or not I can force them to accept my original payment agreement which I sent asking if I could pay £100 a month until 1st April 2010. Have my calls on incoming calls so the bill dosen't get any bigger, and keep my broadband line connected. The Live agent originally wanted me to pay the whole bill on the 01/01/2010, I basically said "NO WAY! ARE YOU CRAZY!". Anyways, let me know what I can do and if I have a valid complaint to take up with somebody about this. Thanks!

Hi, just got a letter this morning from Kingston Communications which is the ISP Karoo in Hull. Basically they've suspended my service under their "Acceptable Use Policy" for File Sharing - Notice of copyright infringement. Their accusations are quite specific, especially when it comes to the information regarding the content downloaded. Their readout appears as follows:- Title: * Infringement Source: BitTorrent Infringement Timestamp: 22 Jun 2008 13:10:11 GMT Infringement Last Documented: 22 Jun 2008 13:10:11 GMT Infringer Username * Infringing Filename: * Infringing Filesize: 1938193503 Infringer IP Address: * Infringer DNS Name: * Infringing URL: tracker.bitreactor.to:2710/announce *Items within are masked for my own privacy reasons, (who knows I might get suspended for typing it into a thread LOL). I'm wondering if they're allowed to throw allegations like that at their customers, and if they are... how do they know if the content downloaded is actually copyrighted material? Do they take a copy of the file downloaded and open the zipped archive to check the contents of the file? I am fuming at this, it's an invasion of my privacy, I'm now beginning to wonder if my ISP is reading my e-mails and monitoring my online browsing activity... Can anybody shed some light on this issue and if KCOM are in breach of any privacy legislation, or just to tell me if they are justified in their actions. Thanks, Graham.

Hi, can anyone advise me how to proceed. I've received a letter from Capquest advising me that they have bought a debt from halifax bank and that I owe them £4,600. Now, I'm not going into details of whether I owe the money or not... but, I suspect that a portion of this debt was generated through Bounced Cheque charges and Unauthorised Overdraft Charges and relevant amounts of intrest on top. Can I go through the standard recovery procedure and obtain a list of all charges with the Data Protection Act letter and counter claim for these charges through the same county court action? I'm sure that the total amount I owe is probably half this amount and I don't want the bank to get this full amount as the charges are unlawful under common law. I even suspect that if a portion of this debt has accrued through unlawful charges then the debt become uninforceable... is this correct? It would be a godsend if someone gets back to me with some advice on how to proceed as I'm currently off work sick with stress/depression and I feel that capquest are going to kill me if they send bailifs round and end up taking away my computer and everything in my home! :o I've tried to cope with the stress by not responding to their letters and locking myself away from the world, maybe this is the wrong thing to do, but I just want the stress to go away! Regards, gpbrown81