It means letter before action which is basically the same as a letter of claim or letter before claim. I suggested on the 6th of April you should send them one

Tell them that your only proposal for payment is the notice period – and a cheque is enclosed. Tell them that you don't intend to make any other payments and that if they want to make an issue of it then they should take you to court. Hang on for input from @slick132 for confirmation of this

Hang on in case you get a different opinion from @slick132 who knows a lot more about this stuff than me.

Basically – tell them to go and do one. Write to them a single letter and tell them that you have made all reasonable attempts to pay the notice fee and that you are not prepared to take any further steps and you are not prepared to pay anything else and that if they want to see you in the County Court you will bring this all to the notice of the judge. After that leave it. The only other thing to say is that they are most unlikely to begin a legal action but if you happen to change address, make sure that you keep people updated of your new address simply to pre-empt the possibility of a back door default judgement as a result of court papers being sent to an old address. That's probably about it

Write to them and begin an immediate formal complaint to the financial ombudsman service. They are required to give you a final response within eight weeks after which you can go to the FOS directly. You should get that going now and don't get involved in any delay

In fact going back, I noticed that I suggested that you send a letter of claim on 6 April. I don't believe you have done it. Had you done that then you would be in a position to issue the court papers immediately. Instead, you now have to wait a further 14 days. What a shame. Sending a letter of claim would not have committed you to anything but it least it would have gotten that necessary pre-action protocol stepped out of the way. You're falling into the trap of getting into protracted exchanges and the only person who benefits is the dealer.

You have received your advice here and you now see the kind of dealer you are involved with. Have you send them a letter of claim? I've rather lost track. If you have sent a letter of claim already then simply issue the papers. If you haven't sent a letter of claim then do so and then issue the papers. I don't think you have any choice. Keep the insurance in place to avoid any complications of the vehicle becoming damaged and then the dealer denying responsibility et cetera. Keep a careful note of all associated expenses

Yes, I think that you probably have a two pronged approach. The judge will ask what a reasonable person would expect – and if the answer is that this falls below those standards, then it becomes a defect – and even though it is a minor defect, it then allows the purchaser to assert their first six months rights under the contract. After six months, the judge will also ask whether the defect undermined the purpose of the contract and that then provides an answer as to what remedy should be awarded in respect of the breach. In respect of the first six months defect, the burden of proof rests upon the trader to show that the defect did not exist. After six months, then the question of when the defect arose is at large – but by and large if it can be said is not a satisfactory quality then I think that any examination of when the defect occurred is pretty well irrelevant. I think the question of when the defect occurred will tend to become important when you start to look at the limits of the period of reasonable expectation. A £3000 £4000 vehicle which fails within the first six months – or even within the first 12 months is almost certainly not matched up to reason expectations. After all, what a reasonable person is going to expect to pay £4000 for a vehicle which maybe needs £1000 or more work on it even before 12 months use? On the other hand, if the vehicle has lasted three or four years without a problem and suddenly this gearbox fault occurs then I'm sure that a lot of discussion will be focused on what is the reason a life expectancy of the vehicle of that age, price, description – and all the other circumstances – as required by the Act.

It might be a lot shorter thread if we can simply ask who is happy about it. Does he get to put his arm round the Queen?

Open

Okay I understand that in fact your problem with Future comms is following the usual pattern. You have entered into a three-year contract with O2 brokered by Future comms. There are two telephones and you are contracted to pay O2 £28 for each one for unlimited texts and unlimited minutes and 6 GB of data. Future comms have promised to return £28 per month to you – but only for 18 months. You entered into the contract in July of last year and so far Future comms have paid you nothing at all. Surprise surprise. By my reckoning this means that they are you £252. I'm afraid that the only thing I can suggest is to send them a letter of claim – using a recurring letter of claim format so that future comms understand that if you don't have your money within 14 days you will see them and that not only that, every time they break a deadline for paying you the next instalment that you will see them again. If you are prepared to do this then we can certainly help you and it is very simple – and assuming you win you will get your money back. There is no reason why you shouldn't win although I am troubled bit about the cash flow position of this company and it will be interesting to see what happens when one of the existing actions which have been started moves to enforcement. If you want to send a letter of claim then you should be sure that you understand what it means to take a legal action in the small claims court. It's very easy and it's pretty well risk-free. Don't imagine that you can send a letter of claim and then not bother. Don't bluff. You only lose credibility. Here is a link to a post which I made some time ago in relation to a recurring letter of claim – and you might want to consider that in relation to this company because it seems that their whole pattern of business is not to pay their debts. Let us know what you want to do

I didn't read it carefully enough. I hadn't picked up on the six months. Thanks

No you don't need to give a warning of recording if it is for your own use. And to sangie5952 , who is much more experienced in these things and me – what about constructive dismissal? And also do we know how long the OP has been in their employment

Hi and welcome to the forum. You notice that I've tried to space out your story a bit to make it easier to read. Large blocks of text very difficult to deal with although I know it's difficult particularly if people are posting from a telephone. We going to have to ask you quite a lot of questions because your story seems to be pretty unusual. The typical Future comms story is that they fix up a contract between you and O2 and then they give you a rebate every month – typically about £18 per month. Often they also promised to pay you your termination fee with your previous supplier which might be anything between £80 to £120. So the usual scenario is that people sign up for a three-year contract with O2, pay O2 the monthly subscription and then get cashback from Future comms. The usual scenario seems to be that Future comms generally speaking doesn't seem to pay the cashback so that people can be owed several hundred pounds and in one case I saw a figure of about £1300 on trust pilot. For some reason rather most people seem to be going along with it and receiving promises which are constantly broken and seem to be tolerating it for a couple of years or more and are simply saying that they won't sign up again but they don't take any other action. To my knowledge there are about three or four people who have now issued proceedings against future comms. One person who sued for several hundreds of pounds has received £18 and a defence to the rest of it. It all makes me feel very uncomfortable because a business which works this way could easily be a business which is in trouble and doesn't have good cash flow. We'll see. Your story seems to be rather unusual because I gather that the money has been taken out of your account by Future comms – not by O2. Is this correct? How are you paying O2 for your service? If future comms are taking overpayments out of your account on a direct debit then the first thing that occurs to me is that you should invoke the direct debit guarantee which will bring your bank into the equation and that will give you a lot of power. But first of all, it will be very helpful if we can understand in detail how your arrangement with Future comms works – because it seems to be completely different to anything we have heard of so far.

Somebody will come along with better expertise – but if you are receiving this sort of treatment over the telephone then you should certainly have installed a call recorder and be gathering all of the information/evidence because it is extremely important for you. Read our customer services guide and implement the advice there. Secondly, start keeping a very detailed log of every incident that occurs including verbatim quotes – who said what to who and when. Make sure any evidence you gather is taken off the premises. If you are able to get the names telephone numbers et cetera of your work colleagues who might be similarly affected then do so that probably you shouldn't discuss any of this with them at work because you never know you can trust when the chips are down.