Builder demanding deposit after cancellation

[xmashelp]

Hi all I am a new poster to the forum but have been viewing for a while. I am in a difficult situation and am wondering if anybody is able to provide me with any guidance. Briefly the situation is as follows; I obtained a number of quotes from building firms in June 19 for full renovation and some structural work in my kitchen. I agreed to proceed with one of the builders following his quote. He subsequently sent through a draft contract and expressly demanded payment of a deposit (approx £2k - 10% of total cost) to be paid in advance of the planned start date in August. A few days after receiving the contract I had 2-3 emails demanding immediate payment of the deposit to secure the dates as they had been apparently turning down plenty of work for the planned time slot. After approx 12-13 days of receiving the contract by email I decided to terminate the contract in writing and released the booked slot as I felt I was being pressured in to making an immediate payment plus I felt their manner was aggressive. Following this I received a nasty email accusing me of wasting their time and that they would suffer financially etc. I declined to reply and heard nothing for a while. Since then I have engaged a different builder to do the work which has started. A few weeks ago I received a letter from the original builder demanding full payment of the £2k deposit. I responded saying that I had exercised my right to cancel and nothing is due as they have not provided any services. They are now threatening court action and obviously I am very stressed about how far they can take this and whether I will be liable to pay them. Any help would be gratefully received. Many thanks Suz

[BankFodder]

You say that what you received was a "draft contract". What makes you say that the contract was "draft"?

You say that you terminated the contract in writing "approximately" 12 to 13 days of receiving it. Please could you be precise about the number of days. An approximation is completely unhelpful here. Once you give us the exact number of days, please will you explain why you are so certain that it is that number.

Please could you post up a draft contract in scanned PDF format

[xmashelp]

10 hours ago, BankFodder said:

You say that what you received was a "draft contract". What makes you say that the contract was "draft"?

You say that you terminated the contract in writing "approximately" 12 to 13 days of receiving it. Please could you be precise about the number of days. An approximation is completely unhelpful here. Once you give us the exact number of days, please will you explain why you are so certain that it is that number.

Please could you post up a draft contract in scanned PDF format

Hi the draft contract was sent to me by email on 20 June. The email stated that ii is a draft contract and that a deposit would be required to secure the dates I wanted. Subsequent to this on 24 June I admittedly stupidly responded that I wanted to secure the dates and would pay the deposit. They sent through an invoice on 27 June for payment and 2 follow up emails on 1 and 2 July demanding that the deposit be settled ASAP. On 3 July I notified them that I did not want to proceed and that they could release the dates for other bookings.

I have already tried telling them that I should have been notified of cancellation terms at the pre-contract stage and that I was cancelling during the cooling off period (14 days). They have said that the cooling off period is not valid.
I realise I should have not changed my mind and wasted some element of their time but I felt pressured in to agreeing to the deposit as they kept emphasising that slots were being filled quickly etc and that I need to book up now. I pulled out with out paying the deposit because I thought they were pressurising me too much to pay immediately. I am very stressed by the entire experience.

 

I can try to upload the 'draft contract' but probably not until tomorrow as need access to a PDF scanner

[BankFodder]

Please will you tell us the name of the builders.

 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3134/regulation/29/made lays out the circumstances in which you lose your right to cancel and off premises contract. I don't see anything here which says that you are not entitled to use the 14 day cooling off period.

I suggest that you email the building immediately and ask him on what basis he says that you are not entitled to a cooling off period. Tell him that if he will not explain this to you then you will not engage in any further communication with him.

In any event, and off premises contract must contain at least the following information – meaning that the supplier of the services must provide you with the following information

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3134/schedule/2/made  

 

Please check your contract and any other messages you have received on paper or by email and see whether together it can be said that you are provided all of this information. If you were not provided with this information then the cooling period doesn't even begin to run. To all intents and purposes the contract is not complete yet.

On the basis of the dates that you have provided to us it would appear that you have exercise your right to cancel just within the 14 day period and so therefore your cancellation is good. It seems to me on the basis of what you have told us that you are being bullied and browbeaten by these people.

If it is correct that they haven't given you any details about the right to cancel then they are potentially committing an offence and once they have explain to you why you don't have the benefit of a cooling off period, you could then reply to them and warn them that by failing to include all of the information in schedule two – but particularly information as to the right to cancel, they are committing an offence. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3134/regulation/19/made

 

Once you are satisfied that you are on secure ground, I would suggest that you write and tell them to do the other thing and that you will be happy to see them in court where you are sure that the judge will be very interested also to see the way they have behaved against you.

Please let us know the name of the builders and also once you are sure of your ground I suggest that you start putting reviews up on trust pilot and Google and elsewhere.

[xmashelp]

Hi

Thanks for your reply. I have discussed this with citizens advice and they have taken details of the builder and reported them to trading standards who will take appropriate action. The builders claim that as the draft contract was sent over by email and I had time to think it over before deciding there is no cooling off period in this case.

 

When sending the draft contract they do not cover any details relating to cancellation rights or any of the details required in the legislation above as they are claiming it should be treated as 'on premises' and therefore my consumer rights do not exist.

 

I prefer not to give their name on a public forum at the moment but they are certainly not making my life easy at the moment. They are threatening to sue me for breach of contract if i do not pay up in 14 days.

[BankFodder]

Please monitor this thread for a reply tomorrow.

however you are wrong not to give the builders name. It won't do you any harm that it may help and it will certainly help others.

Don't imagine that trading standards will take any action. They won't

 

[BankFodder]

Firstly, we better dispel a bit of the mythology about trading standards.

A few years ago you could contact trading standards directly and lodge a complaint and they would take notice. Nowadays – particularly since the 2009 crisis – there have been huge cuts in budgets everywhere. Organisations have been closed down including the O F T and consumer focus. The bulk of the work has been given to Citizens Advice but without the necessary increases in budget.

There is now no longer any direct access to trading standards. Also, trading standards is by and large an organisation which is fragmented into local authority areas which to my mind means a huge amount of duplication of resources so the whole thing is very inefficient. When you are dealing with problems with say, local builders, it's not so bad but when you are dealing with Internet problems – fraud and so forth then trading standards are really quite inadequate to the task.

As I say, there is now no longer any direct access to trading standards. When you report something to citizens advice, they entered into a database with the millions of other reports and if the appropriate local trading standards takes notice then you are a very lucky person. As far as I can gather you need lots of complaints about the same company before you can get them to start beginning any kind of investigation.

If you think that the citizens advice report will attract any attention from trading standards then you are kidding yourself.

Social media is far more effective for these companies because it hits their reputation immediately. I don't know what benefit you think there might be from protecting their reputation by not publishing the name here. It doesn't help you and it doesn't help other potential victims. It means that this company will be able to go on treating other people in exactly the same way and the majority of those people won't be lucky enough to find this forum and they will simply believe what they are told by this company and allow themselves to be taken for a ride. By withholding the name of this company you become complicit in this.

Still if you think that there is some advantage to you then please let us know what it is. I'm very curious.

I have already said that you are entitled to a cooling off period and I have given you the sources of the legislation which deals with that. I imagine you have already had from this thread for more information which you have had from citizens advice. Citizens advice are okay for some things but by and large the best you can say of them is that they are – well-intentioned.

Have you follow any of the advice that I gave you in my previous post number four?

[BankFodder]

And just to continue the trading standards rants a little bit longer, here are some examples of cases which were far more significant than your one (I'm afraid) and caused far more damage and yet despite the fact that they were reported to trading standards multiple times, both to citizens advice and also directly to trading standards through my own contacts, nothing was done until it was too late.

Harvill Shaw – who ran various wall rendering companies over a period of years, folding each one up after a couple of years leading victims behind. It took about six years before the matter was properly looked at by trading standards and Harvill got two years in prison. However, hundreds of people were left out of pocket and with their properties damaged as a result of his poor workmanship and his lack of truth in respect of lifetime guarantees and work being insurance backed. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/investigate-caught-in-a-web-of-lies-510928  https://hendersonlawyers.co.uk/2019/08/05/render-exterior-wall-coatings-director-imprisoned/

Cash4phones – this company advertised very good prices for used telephones – but the problem is you got a quote/offer for your phone over the phone and then when you sent your telephone into them, you either never received your money or else you are told that the condition of your phone with so poor that only a fraction of the promised value could be paid to you. If you protested then very often your telephone was returned to you but by that time it had a broken screen and you were told that that was the condition in which it had arrived. Tens of thousands of these telephones went missing. Nobody was ever prosecuted but the company eventually went into liquidation. I think something like 10,000 telephones were unclaimed and were eventually sold off for almost nothing – amazingly to the people who had owned the company – who so far as I can understand all ended up in Cyprus. Trading standards had been made aware of this for years and yet did nothing about it. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jan/09/cash4phones-files-bankruptcy

 

Future comms – Future Communications Specialists Ltd – recently gone into liquidation, left hundreds and maybe thousands of customers shortchanged and many of them in debt as a result of promises of rebates and termination fees to be paid when they moved their mobile phone service business to O2. The company was run by Lewis Tribble and Joseph Mark Stickler who by all accounts are now working for another communications company in the Portsmouth/Gosport area. This company was reported very often to citizens advice and also directly to trading standards through my own contacts – and yet nothing was done. Now the company is in liquidation and there are rumours – needs checking – that the boys are still driving around in fancy cars.   https://www.google.com/search?q=future+comms&oq=fu&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j35i39l2j69i60l3.14959j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#lrd=0x4874679ceafead69:0x8e11490fb9ce7dc,1,,,  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-49573148

 

I'm afraid that whilst consumer organisations have been closed down or remain underfunded, the only way to limit the activities of these people, to spread awareness of rights and to protect your fellow consumers is by the use of social media.

Do you still want to protect your builders?

 

 

 

[xmashelp]

I can assure you that I am not trying to protect my builders but given their bullying nature am wary of causing further aggravation which could incite physical or other threats if I do not meet their demands.

 

I appreciate your advice and will take this further as advised.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

 

[BankFodder]

I'm afraid that is your kind of attitude that brings comfort to these kinds of people.

[ericsbrother]

contract law is heavily based around the term performance of or to a contract. the builders havent actually done anything and cant perform their side of the bargain until you pay up. waht do they intend to do after you pay them this 2 grand, come round and do up your kitchen? No, so they cant (or wont) perform their side of the bargain so arent owed any money.

Thety may be miffed about being messed around over this but that it mostly of their own doing anyway. If you had paid them the 2 thou and then changed your mind about the work they may have a case for keeping the money but ultimately the contract here isnt formed due to you not handing over the money.

 

personally I wouldnt trust a firm that asks for money up front, you agree to pay in stages for a big job so for exampkle if the refit was expected to take a month you would probably expect to pay £5k after a fortnight, the same agin after another week and the remaining 50% upon completion.

the alternative is that they ask you to buy in the bulk of the materials based on a list they provide beforehand so they have limited exdpenditure and there is no argument over who owns what