Veolia charging for services not supplied

[AWC]

Hoping someone can offer advice.

 

Cut a long story short, wife and I own a few businesses in the South of England, and we use environmental disposal companies to collect our waste from each site. Set up our latest business in July 2011, arranged a 12 month contract with Veolia to supply a container bin on site and to collect fortnightly. All was well until October 2012 when they changed the dates, times and frequency of the collections without informing us. They then sent a invoice claiming to have collected the bin four times in one month, and also claiming that twice in the same month they were unable to empty the bin because the site was locked up, but how could we ensure it was available when they are only supposed to collect fortnightly and within working hours?

 

We disputed this via phone and by letters, but after countless calls which were either not answered or returned during November or December, we wrote to them cancelling the contract and direct debit, primarily due to them defaulting on collections. They put us on stop even though we had cancelled the contract in writing, but they refused to discuss anything unless we paid up for oct, nov & dec, even though there were no collections.

 

To date, there have been no collections since October. We have paid up to end of December, the bin is still on our site, they have cashed all our cheques which went with the letters. They have not responded to any of our correspondence, they keep sending invoices for a fee for 'duty of care' each month which relates to sorting and disposing of our rubbish, which they have not collected. They are now threatening legal action if we do not pay for January and February, yet they are the party who are delaying the process and not acknowledging or carrying out our instructions to cancel the contract.

 

We are running around in circles, never had such bad customer care from a business as this. Any advice

[warriorsq]

The company I work for has used Veolia to empty our bins weekly for a number of years now. Like you everything was fine until about last September/October then they started changing the dates and times of the collections without informing us as well and some weeks don't come at all. The boss has spoken to them on several occasions but things have not improved

[CHRIS44G]

Grundon are the same. We had a contract to empty our bin monthly, but they used to empty it on the 1st, then again 4 weeks later on the 28th, then again on the 1st again,then again on the 28th; i.e. twice a month at twice the cost.

Business to business problems are often the worst to sort out.

[AWC]

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated!

 

Thought I would give a quick update. We emailed the head office last night to say that unless they have collected their bin within 7 days, we will be charging them £1 storage per day that it remains on site. We got a reply first thing this morning from them apologising and also saying that they will sort it out asap and refund our money.

 

So, looks like we may finally have a result!

 

We will now of course remove them from all our other sites and use another company.

[warriorsq]

AWC

 

We spoke to the driver when they did turn up yesterday and he said they got rid of a load of staff and doubled the rounds for the remaining crews, hence the terrible sevice

[AWC]

AWC

 

We spoke to the driver when they did turn up yesterday and he said they got rid of a load of staff and doubled the rounds for the remaining crews, hence the terrible sevice

 

That doesn't surprise me, horrendous customer care.