Awoke to a letter from my housing association (Radian) today charging me £60 for dumping a sofa bed in a communal alley. I was a little surprised as ive not ever owned a sofa bed at this property. I gave them a ring but the person who deals with it was not available and is going to ring me back. All i could find out was that someone had apparently seen me do it. I was looking for advice on what i can do about it. Can they throw charges at people like this with such flimsy information? is it enforceable? i asked for the persons details but they wouldn't give me them, isnt evidence supposed to be public? I use this alley nearly daily and haven't seen a sofa bed out there anytime in recent months which worries me even more, if this incident has been reported as happening a very long time ago haven't they made it very hard for me to defend against? Many thanks for any input.

Recently received a renewal notice for the electricity supply for my small business from SSE. This stated that I would need to pay 19 weeks supply charges up front, and may also have to pay increased unit cost charges. SSE claimed that the reasons for this was due to my failing a credit check, but when I contacted them on the phone they were unable to outline the reasons for my failing, or to explain why I had passed the 3 previous checks with no problems (all since reference checks started). This seemed to like SSE clawing extra profits out of hard bitten small business customers, and in my case the fact they had been providing me with electricity for 13 years, with no issues related to payments, did I felt have some bearing on the situation. Over the course of a couple of days I spoke to several SSE droids about this situation, with one of them claiming that charging deposits, and increased unit costs did not result in higher profits! A customer of mine works in an executive position in one of the smaller energy companies, and I discussed this with him. It would seem companies such as SSE are dumping higher risk small business customers, by far more stringent credit checks, which mean customers either pay the deposits required, and in some cases unit cost increases of up to 30% higher. The reason for the use of this strategy, is down to the fact they cannot lawfully refuse to supply a customer, so are encouraging them to go elsewhere using the method outlined above. I wonder have any other forum members running small businesses got one of these notices? Seems to me that the greed of these people is astonishing, and bearing in mind the current economic situation, and the enormous profits the energy co's posted last year, that the press might be interested in what seems to me an obvious way of sidestepping the law, to ensure even higher profits?