Hiya, I tried to take about £30 of shopping from Waitrose today. I know I'm an idiot (hence the username) I'm not doing it again, I've been scared about it and want to just move on. I'm worried about the civil recovery thing. I admitted to having taken something before on one occasion from Waitrose and so they gave me a lifelong ban. They didn't contact the police but they scanned my ID and took a photo of my face. I got given a letter from RPL. What legal advice do I need to get? They told me I will get a fine 'probably around £100'. When will I get this letter, does anyone know? what happens now? The letter says at the bottom: 'In principle the Data Protection Act 1998 does not prevent the use of data for civil recovery and employment screening purposes... Your personal data may be stored and used by prospective employers within client companies to make employment decisions...' What does this mean realistically? I think I might want to work with kids as a teacher - will this stop me from being able to? Any help is appreciated.

Hi all I wanted some advice please. I bought Car Insurance with John Lewis in Dec '12 and arranged to pay by Direct Debit. In January the DD failed, I recieved a letter saying the bank had told them it had been cancelled so I called paid over the phone and reset the DD. In Feb the DD failed, I called, and it was suggested that the issue was possibly due to the fact that I have another DD to john lewis on the same date and that was the confusion, I was told to wait, see what happened with the march payment and go from there. In march the DD failed, as the DD date was a weekend I didn't intend to chase the issue until a week had passed as sometimes they payment can be delayed a few days, however 5 days after the DD date I received two letters from John Lewis on the same day, 1 to say the payment had failed and I needed to pay or they would cancel my policy and the 2nd to say - "we cancelled your policy 5 days ago please pay us £135" I called straight away to sort out the problem, and to be honest the woman was really off with me until I broke down (I was hit by a lorry last year and the thought of that happening while id been driving around unbeknown to me uninsured got me in a right state) I paid all the cancellation charges, and purchased a new policy (the price had now increased) I logged a complaint with my bank as I hadn't cancelled these direct debits but each time I was told that the bank had said I had. After a month of investigation it turns out that John Lewis set the mandate up in December for the first payment in March! so each time they asked for payment my bank said no I'm fuming, I suffered PTSD after the accident last year and to be honest I was pretty histerical after my call with John Lewis that night, fortunatley I always insure fully comp and i've had a year of medical treatments that I couldn't have afforded, and still have £4k worth of pescription bills and loss of earnings that I'm trying to claim back to think I could have had an accident that week and not been insured doesn't even bare thinking about. I'm just writing a letter of complaint and I wondered if you think I am being reasonable with the following request: A refund for the £135 the charged me for the cancelled policy (admin fee & legal for the full year!) A refund of the additional £24 this year I'm having to pay on the new policy I had to purchase because they cancelled the original policy A letter confirming that a "cancelled Policy" was down to their incompetance (I've had to declare it to all my other insurance companies) Compensation for the fact that they wrote to tell me my policy had been cancelled and sent it 2nd class meaning I recieved it 5 days after they had cancelled and was driving round uninsured, invalidating my tax disc and breaking the law despite them having my email address (which they send the policy to) and my telephone number Compensation for the inconvience of regular calls with Santander to get updates on their investigation, ringing round all my insures with the embarrasment of telling them I have a cancelled policy on my records and to be honest the state it got me into that night my parents had to come sit with me and i'm 33! so embarrasing Also (sorry!) does anyone know if they can retract the "cancelled policy" note? as I'm going to have to declare that for 5 years Thanks for reading!

I was notified a while back that John Lewis were changing their underwriters from AXA to Royal and Sun but there would be no significant changes to the policies. As I recently moved house I contacted JL to inform them about my change of address and was informed that pet insurance was based on post code and on top of that the renewal which is due soon will increase by over 30%. I asked how this can be when my older dog is cheaper to insure than my younger dog (who by now was the same age as the older dog as he had just had a birthday). I was fobbed of with the excuse that it is all to do with statistics and that one of the reasons could be, 5 year old dogs were more prone to illness .... yeah likely story. I have just looked up AXA insurance and note that in July 2013, AXA announced they will no longer be offering pet insurance.

Hi all, I would welcome the advice of other CAGGER's regarding a problem with an ironing board we purchased from a John Lewis store in 2010. After going through a number of cheaper ironing boards, we decided that the one own-branded item looked very sturdy and was built to last. Unfortunately not, though... it collapsed on me yesterday due to the weld joining the board to the legs completely failing. Here's the item: http://www.johnlewis.com/john-lewis-circles-ironing-board-l135-x-w46cm/p231402952 As you can see, it was not a cheap product. It's currently 80 GPB, we bought it for 75. I've called John Lewis to complain about it and that my expectations regarding the price and solid-looking construction have not been fulfilled. I had hoped that such an item would last longer than this. At the moment they are falling back on the 2 year guarantee, and as it is outside of that time, the most they would be willing to offer is store vouchers to the value of 35 GBP. They state that there have not been any other failures of this product, certainly within the same batch. Do you think this is a reasonable offer? I know that JL tends to be good when it comes to customer service, in some cases better than a lot of retailers out there, but I am still disappointed that such an expensive purchase has failed so soon. Thanks.

Hi, I bought my Panasonic washing machine 8 months ago from John Lewis and until 2 weeks ago it worked brilliantly. Then we washed 3 separate loads of clothes, each one washed, rinsed and then refused to spin. The final time it came up with an error code of U12 but the first two washes there was no code, it just wouldn't spin. I telephoned John Lewis who gave me the Panasonic number as it is under one year old. Panasonic don't have their own engineers so a local company came out today. The man instilled in me no cofidence at all, he saw the error code U12 and asked me what that meant. He looked clueless tbh. He asked me if I had anything to put in the machine to wash so I fetched a bath sheet and put that in. We watched it wash, rinse and then when it came to the time for spinning it just slowly turned the load over and refused to spin. The engineer telephoned Panasonic who informed him that error U12 was a door problem, but there seems to be nothing wrong with the door and the error code did not appear this time anyway. Panasonic told him that the machine is not spinning because it is an uneven load and there is nothing wrong with the machine. The Panasonic man says his own machine sometimes turns the clothes over slowly for up to 25 minutes until the machine feels the load is even enough to spin. He says the load is not even and I should take things out or add things in to the load to make it spin. On hearing there is nothing wrong with my machine, the repair man leaves having done nothing to the machine at all. I dash outside with my dripping wet towel to hang outside where it will take days to dry. So, the repair man comes, sees the machine refusing to spin and leaves saying there is nothing wrong with the machine. Today's load was one towel, but previously it has refused to spin on 3 different loads of clothes having worked perfectly before that. John Lewis say there is nothing they can do without an upload number which Panasonic have to provide, and they don't think Panasonic will provide it and Panasonic are saying there is nothing wrong with the machine. I have an 8 month old machine that won't spin anything. JL have asked Panasonic to send out another engineer and I am waiting for a call back to arrange a date/time for that but given what the bloke said this morning, I am not hopeful as Panasonic are saying the machine is fine. Any ideas? I have spend a fortune on laundrette fees for 2 weeks as they couldn't get an engineer out sooner and I can see I will have more ongoing costs while I await another engineer.