A Brighton Boy Blogs

This unadvertised special offer from Brighton & Hove City Council occurred on… yes you guessed it, April 1st. So how many others received PCNs (Penalty Charge Notices) erroneously? How much has it all cost to sort out?

Just to explain, for some reason some Brighton parking ticket machines were issuing one-hour tickets when they should have been issuing two-hour tickets. Yes it’s all so easy to sort out, but why should I have to spend my valuable time sorting out yet another Brighton & Hove City Council bureaucratic cock-up? It might help if they employed Parking Wardens with brains… sorry, “Civil Enforcement Officers”.

Oh dear, now I’ll probably be chastised & hated for insulting council workers… but let’s face it, it doesn’t take much brain power to work out that a parking machine saying “£3 for up to 2 hours” and a parking ticket saying £3 paid for 13:12 to 14:12 means that no PCN should have been issued in the first place!

When an airline destroys your suitcase on your outbound flight, you’d like to expect that they’d be not only apologetic but also perhaps actively help you find a replacement for the journey home. Alas in Monarch’s case they failed on every step of the way to customer service satisfaction.

We reported the completely smashed International Traveller hard-shell suitcase at Grenoble Airport, where we did the necessary paperwork and were told we’d have to contact Monarch within seven days in order to claim compensation. That meant we’d have to do it while we were in France. The suitcase was unsalvageable so we’d also have to source a replacement whilst in the ski resort of La Plagne, where it’s easy to find ski or snowboarding stuff but incredibly hard (and expensive) to get items such as suitcases.

So, during the week we took time out from what we were meant to be doing on a skiing holiday to talk to Monarch about the claim and find a new suitcase. All we had was mobile phone, so at our great cost we called Monarch and held on listening to some of the most expensive hold-music ever created, before speaking to a lady who took all our details and offered us a measly £45 compensation. As I said, it’s incredibly hard finding something so mundane as a suitcase in a skiing resort with village/small town facilities and a single-minded focus on snow sports. On the third trip around the shops my girlfriend managed to find a large Ripcurl bag for €130, which at the time was near enough £130 – leaving us with a whopping £85 shortfall on a new bag which we were only buying because our suitcase had been smashed by people working on behalf of Monarch Airlines. Oh, and nothing to say sorry for all the time wasted, skiing missed and roaming phone costs endured.

Around 10 days after we returned, the cheque for £45 turned up in the post along with a letter that was full of empty apologetic platitudes which had exactly the same effect as if they’d included a hand-scribbled note saying “sod off and don’t waste our time in future”. Completely meaningless, corporate waffle, devoid of any real conviction, and rendered meaningless by the accompanying derisory compensation. All of which leads me to the unescapable conclusion that Monarch Airlines doesn’t actually care about its customers at all, and in a cut-throat and competitive market place, that is surely a rather stupid attitude to have.

I’m finally turning away from Royal Mail for most of my business carriage. I’ve tried to remain loyal, after all it’s one of those Great British Institutions, isn’t it? But when it’s this painful, you’ve got to wonder… are Royal Mail management really trying to commit commercial suicide? It certainly looks that way from here.

We have been using Royal Mail Smartstamp to prepay and locally print postage labels. It’s an imperfect solution, particularly for tracked services like “signed for” (or recorded delivery as it used to be known) and “special delivery”. Those services have to be completed at a post office where most of the staff either don’t know how to handle them or really can’t be bothered. That’s if you can find a post office that’s open when you need to post something. Many were closed in major cuts during 2008. I went to four of them one Wednesday afternoon & found all closed. All are in roads with parking problems and not at all easy to use. On my fifth attempt on the following day I was told my package was too big for their window & should be taken to a main post office. So not wanting to give up before the sixth attempt I went to the nearest main post office only to be told that my item was 11cm too big to be sent as a signed-for item. And still my customer is waiting.

Part of the problem seems to stem from the split of the Post Office from Royal Mail years ago. It created a complete disconnection between the two halves of the process. Neither really knows what the other half is doing, or cares about the customers caught between the two halves.

So it’s off to a courier company for me, and RIP Royal Mail, once it finally breathes its last and dies.

Since we decided to leave Esporta Brighton, we’ve had no end of threatening behaviour from the company and its debt collector ARC Europe. This isn’t anything unusual, they’ve done it to lots of people – just try a Google search.

Esporta’s membership contract says that they can terminate a membership with one month’s notice, but that a member cancelling their membership must give three months notice – paid, of course. So when someone like me wants to leave because the facilities are poorly maintained and the club just isn’t up to scratch, they try to enforce this contact term. However, there is a piece of legislation called the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 which companies like Esporta should be rather wary of when they ask their lawyers to draft their contacts. Used in conjunction with the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, one can essentially ask a court of law to review a contract term, and if found to be unfair, the entire clause is struck from the contract. With nothing to replace it, standard UK trading laws take over and there’s nothing the company can do; with no fair cancellation clause in place, they’re not entitled to a penny.

Esporta’s contact terms relating to notice periods have already been ruled unfair by the Office of Fair Trading (see http://www.oft.gov.uk/advice_and_resources/resource_base/consumer-regulations/traders/790/1/), along with quite a lot besides. This ruling would be taken into account by the courts in any case involving Esporta’s membership contracts. This means that nobody should be paying Esporta three months’ fees upon notice of cancellation. Unfortunately a lot of people give way to bullying from the company and its debt collectors. Why is this allowed to happen? Unfortunately a contract is only of any use when tested in a court of law. Since most people shudder at the thought of being taken to court by a big powerful company, most people just give in and pay up. It’s important not to give in, and to fight your corner, because that’s the only way companies like Esporta will be stopped.

Unfortunately this wasn’t all in our case. ARC Europe obtained copies of the contracts my girlfriend and I allegedly signed, and sent them through to us by way of a “now get out of that one” threat. To be honest, I didn’t remember signing a contract, so I was surprised they had a signed one to send me. Upon examination however, it wasn’t my signature. My girlfriend had signed, but I hadn’t. In place of my signature was a very poor forgery in the same handwriting style as that of the Esporta employee who had signed on behalf of the company.

Just to be clear about this, forging a signature on a contract is criminal fraud under UK law. Are Esporta really that desperate? Apparently the answer is yes.

April 2010 Update: lots of letters & phone calls received from ARC Europe (culminating in a threat of solicitors & legal action) & subsequently ScotCall – threatening doorstep collections – and then numerous phone calls from a call centre asking for payment and offering substantial discounts if we give them a card payment over the phone… and all addressed to my partner, not me. This is no doubt because she’s female and relatively young, and therefore seen as the easy target by the bully boys. Indeed she may have got scared & paid up anyway if I hadn’t been around. Finally, a Final Demand letter from ScotCall – saying that the balance remains unpaid despite their correspondence and that they have no choice but to… return the case to Esporta with a recommendation that they take further action. I’ll keep you posted of any further developments. Let me know if you’re also being harassed for money by Esporta & its cronies on the basis of an unfair contract.

Just a quick public information notice: Belkin makes the most unreliable, poorly designed, unmitigated rubbish in the world. It’s true. I have owned several items by Belkin, none of which has ever worked properly, and have always given them the benefit of the doubt. But the Belkin Vision N1 router is the last Belkin device I shall ever own. It crashes all the time and I can’t keep a wireless connection for more than 20 minutes or so before it overheats and freezes. They can have it back through their office windows for all I care. I should sue for the amount of lost time and stress Belkin has caused me. None of their products work properly, or at least work for long. The USB hubs regularly need to be unplugged from the mains and reconnected just so they recognise the devices plugged into them. If it says Belkin, just don’t go there. Please. Perhaps then Belkin will actually take notice and produce something decent for once. Companies like this just don’t deserve to exist.

Sometimes I get great service from a company and I’ll write about it. When I find serious fault with a company, I tend to report it on here too. If that company demonstrably puts things right, I tend to report that as well. Alas, that doesn’t happen very often. But recently I had a call from Mr John Collins, Managing Director of Kafevend Group Ltd who claimed that my previous report on Kafevend – an incident involving criminal fraud on the part of Kafevend’s sales staff – had been fully investigated and dealt with. So I allowed Mr Collins to come and tell me the story.

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15th September 2008: It was a Monday evening in Brighton, it was getting late for dinner, and we fancied sushi. Moshi Moshi would have been our usual destination, but being closed on Mondays we remembered YO! Sushi in Jubilee Street and decided to give it a try. Perhaps a little glimpse at the competition might prove eye-opening.

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… or how a friend’s 21st birthday party was ruined by Brewer’s Fayre and Whitbread plc at the Nevill Crest and Gun in Eridge, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

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£6 for a sandwich. No, this isn’t one of those posh sandwiches where you can hardly get your face around the thing which is held together with a cocktail stick with a chef’s hat on, where its gourmet credentials are incontrovertible and where the experience leaves you with a smile on your face for days. No, this is a £6 piece of crap. Where? Read more…