Electricals Don't Get Done Get Dom

I'm Dominic Littlewood and I'm here to champion your consumer rights.

I'm going to go in with a phone call now and ask them for more.

Any problem, no matter how big or small,

I'll help you get the service you deserve.

I'm getting the impression you don't want to actually

answer any questions now, is that correct?

Whether it involves getting your money back...

I was just horrified that a company can help themselves

to my money out of my bank account without me knowing about it.

..or taking on your contract conundrums.

We hit that brick wall and we were getting nowhere with them.

I'm on the case...

On today's show.... I'm fully charged to help two people

in their battle with a high street giant.

The 12 month warranty, which basically, to me, wasn't worth the

paper it was written on, because both Currys and HP were refusing to help

me and refusing to look at the tablet without me paying £310 up front.

How one company's mistakes made two women's lives a living hell...

They kept sending bills.

And I was becoming extremely concerned,

especially as they started to become more and more threatening.

And we look into the infamous call centre

to see how it's changed its tone.

Call centres are often thought of as lots of people behind desks,

reading through very, very tight scripts. It's not like that any more.

And it is certainly not like that in the UK.

I'm taking on your consumer problems

to make sure that you don't get done.

Technology, we can hardly live without it these days, can we?

But if something breaks or stops working, we want to scream,

pull our hair out, we want it sorted out sooner rather than later.

But, if it is still under the manufacturer's guarantee,

or you have an accidental damage insurance policy on it,

that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

Manish Sharma from Ilford contacted me after a little accident involving

his cousin's children and his laptop that he had recently

bought from Currys.

It was a wiring problem, accidentally, by the kids.

The laptop was dropped from the kitchen table onto the hard floor

and it's been dropped sideways and it damaged the power side

and the screen is all cracked from inside.

So the one side of the laptop is just completely damaged.

What a disaster!

But accidents do happen and as Manish had taken out an insurance

policy, also from Currys, to cover for such an incident,

he wasn't too upset...

Until he heard back from the company.

This is the letter I got from Currys

saying the damage had been inspected by the engineer and is inconsistent.

The letter explained that the damage was inconsistent with

the reported explanation

and/or the damage exceeds what they would expect,

given the circumstances.

So, they sent my laptop, just like this, without repairing it.

Manish used his laptop for work

so wanted a policy which would cover any eventuality.

The policy is Whatever Happens, means anything happens, if you drop

the laptop, if it was being damaged, and it covers worldwide.

So, if I dropped the laptop on the floor, they would change it.

Anything.

They don't cover water damage, but they cover all accidental damage.

It gives you confidence level a bit more

while you are working on the laptop or doing anything

that your laptop is more secure with that policy.

So after the accident, he was happy in the knowledge it would be dealt with quickly.

He contacted Currys and put in a claim for accidental damage.

First, I made a phone call to book in, so I spoke with the guys

over the phone with the know-how, that this is the damage.

They said fine, they took the laptop.

And they said within seven working days, your laptop would be fixed.

And if they couldn't fix it, they promised Manish a replacement

laptop. So far, so good.

I get a phone call after the three days. They left me a message.

We're returning your laptop.

So, I got back to Currys on the same day,

they said, your laptop is not here. And they have not been informed.

The next day, Manish got a call from Currys informing him that

his laptop was now ready for him to collect,

and this is when they dropped the bomb shell

that they would not be fixing or replacing it.

If you want to know anything,

you need to contact the address at the bottom, and OK,

I said, have you got any e-mail address to make it more easier?

He said no, you have to contact by post.

Manish appealed, but it was refused. He decided to appeal again!

She goes to me, the area manager of Currys,

they are especially looking into your case.

But we can't fix your laptop.

Manish isn't going to give up the fight, however

he can't remain laptop-less until it's all resolved, so he's

already had to fork out hundreds of pounds for another computer.

If Dominic can just fulfil the policy, get me a replacement

laptop, after all these months, after all these months, it would be great.

Anything will do.

I agree.

I feel it's now time for me to get on the case.

I'm going to send an e-mail to Currys asking for an explanation.

Chances are, most people know of or have shopped at Currys.

They're a well known face on the British high street,

specialising in selling home electronics and household

appliances, with 295 superstores and 73 high street stores.

It's owned by Dixon Retail Plc, Europe's largest specialist

electrical retailing and services company

and their website claims to bring the latest technology at the best

prices to their customers combined with great advice

and after-sales care. Not that Manish would agree.

Or Christine McDermott from West Yorkshire,

who's also been in touch with me about Currys.

Her problems began after she bought a brand-new Hewlett Packard

tablet for her son as a Christmas present.

When Simon opened the tablet, he obviously had to charge it up first.

He put it on to charge up

and it seemed to be very slow at charging up.

The battery had come up, it would go about halfway and then stop.

So I had to take the charger out and then put it back in,

to reset the charging

and it would just carry on from where it left off.

After a while, he went to check on it and it was still only

halfway charged up.

But he decided at this point, that it was time to play on it,

so, he played on it and then after he had finished,

he put it onto charge again and after a full night of charging,

it still hadn't charged up fully.

Not a great start to Christmas!

I felt very disappointed and obviously, the manufacturers,

there was a problem with it when it was manufactured.

Christine decided there was obviously something wrong with the tablet,

but was confident the problem would be sorted out in a flash,

as it was brand-new and came with a 12 month warranty.

I wasn't very happy at all, so I decided to go down to Currys and ask

them about the situation and what they were prepared to do with it?

And they just told me to contact HP.

And they gave me the telephone number and e-mail number for them.

HP, the maker of the tablet, would be responsible

if there was a manufacturing issue, so Christine got straight onto them.

I went onto the HP website to try and contact them and

I clicked on the contact button and contacted HP

through their own website.

And to this day, I have not actually had an e-mail back from them.

So her tech savvy son Luke gave them a call.

They said that it wasn't covered on accidental damage

and it must be something we had done by forcing the charger or

something like that, into it,

and it would cost £310 if we wanted them to have a look at it.

At this point, my son actually told them that it was far cheaper

to go out and buy a new one than it was to actually get it repaired.

So, Christine went straight back down to Currys.

They explained what had happened

and he just said it had nothing to do with them.

It had to do with HP.

Here we go again!

Christine felt like she was hitting her head against a brick wall.

I knew that my consumer rights were with them,

that I had purchased the goods from them and as far as I was

concerned, my 12 month guarantee was actually with Currys.

Not with HP.

At this point, they just turned around and said, well, no,

you need to ring HP and we can't do anything about it.

So neither Currys nor HP have actually inspected the product,

yet Christine was told the problem

must have been down to her own misuse.

I feel like I have been treated by Currys and HP unfairly.

I purchased my goods in good faith, that if anything did go wrong,

the items would be sorted out.

I have sent an e-mail to Currys outlining Christine's case,

but I also need to get onto HP.

They claim to be the world's leading PC manufacturer.

Based in California, last year it made 112 billion dollars,

not bad for a business that started out in a garden shed!

So we're talking a mega power in the world of IT!

They may be a super force, but I'm fully charged to take them

on and I start by sending them an e-mail down the wire.

The next time you pick up the phone to pay a bill, book a holiday

or reserve some tickets, it's highly likely

that you'll talk to someone at a call centre.

Call centres, I say it's getting a little bit better than it used

to be, but the problem often is just getting through to them

in the first place.

Clearly, many see them as a nuisance and time and

time again, they've been voted one of the most

frustrating things to use!

You just get shuffled from person to person and then the last person,

each person doesn't know what the actual original issue was.

So they haven't actually told them anything, they just move you

on to yet another new person who has no idea what you're talking about.

I know exactly what you mean,

so let's see what a call centre boss has to

say about your experiences.

The call centre industry has clearly had some bad press over

the years, however, we are very much a necessary business.

And in fact, we're very much a growing business in the UK

and around the world.

Call centres in the UK were first created

back in the 1960s to help business deal with customer enquiries.

If you think back, in days before call centres,

everyone was based in offices, behind desks and telephones,

sometimes in different floors, sometimes in different rooms.

And so, communicating internally within departments was

actually quite difficult.

So, call centres evolved as a way to say, right,

bring all of these different facets together, customer service,

sales, management etc, put them all in a room where

they can be next to each other, near to each other, and be able to

talk and communicate and help a customer much more quickly.

Now, just over 50 years later, it is reported that over one

million people are now employed in call centres.

This is over 3.5% of the entire UK workforce.

It's very difficult to get the exact department that you

want to talk with.

And yes, sometimes it is quite difficult to have a

resolution to any basic problems.

Our raison d'etre as an outsourcer is to really try

and offer first-time resolution.

We all know how frustrating it is if you have to phone ten times to the

same centre, and so we are very much paid to handle our clients' calls,

deal with the customer and try and resolve their query there and then.

It just seems like they're this big kind of like farms of people

on telephones and there is no kind of,

no-one takes any ownership of your issues or your problems.

We've all got used to the big warehouse type environments,

where 1,000, 1,500 people would sit in a huge room and have to

put their hand up to go to the toilet and it was very impersonal.

And it created quite robotic agents.

The issue with that and the downside to it is that those agents

then didn't have a personality, it had to be very, very script-led.

Over the past five to seven years, that has very much changed.

I think it is fair to say most people would find

when they're speaking to a UK call centre, that the

customer experience has much improved over the last few years.

So call centres now are aiming to have a bit more of a personal touch,

BUT you don't always know if you're talking directly

to the company you've dialled.

In the UK, there's two main types of call centres,

one is an in-house call centre, which is

in their own building or in fact an outsourced call centre.

The difference is that the in-house is managed and staffed

by the companies' own people, employed by them and managed by them.

In an outsourced environment, the outsource is hired to provide

all the facilities, systems and people to manage the customer

service desk, for example, on behalf of a client.

I think people in call centres are told to only answer a certain

set of questions, but occasionally,

you will get those people who go the extra bit to help you out.

Some people are just built to be rude, over the telephone,

but sometimes you do get really, really nice customers

and it's really worthwhile to be on the phone with them.

They could be having a bad day, let alone us, say for example,

so they might take it out on us over the phone,

but you've got to have a clearer view of where the customer's coming from.

However, some of you still find it a frustrating experience.

You get through five or six different menus to get somewhere,

then you get thrown out of the system cos the technology isn't up to it,

and you have to go back to the beginning, so you have to

write down the numbers to make sure you make it as short as possible.

We understand that customers can find the push-button process, press one,

two, three or the voice recognition systems actually quite confusing.

And we very much recommend as a business to our clients,

that there should be no more than say, three or four options

that you can push to try and get through to a relevant department.

OK, I'll be counting those button presses next time

I phone up a big company!

Love 'em or hate 'em, call centres look set to stay, so let's just hope

they become less inclined to hang up and more likely to hang out!

I'm battling two heavy weights of the IT world,

Currys and HP, as both appear to have lost their connection

with a couple of their customers.

Manish Sharma and Christine MacDermot feel these

companies have not honoured their insurance policies or warranties.

The 12 month warranty, which basically, to me, wasn't worth the

paper it was written on, because both Currys and HP were refusing to help

me and refusing to look at the tablet without me paying £310 upfront.

Feeling they had nowhere else to turn, Christine and Manish have asked

for help from yours truly, and that is exactly what I intend on doing.

My ideal outcome would actually be to have a replacement

for the item that will work and will not cause us any more problems!

I've e-mailed Currys and HP and are waiting for them to get back.

So for now, let's take a moment to delve deeper into Manish's

case starting with his 'Whatever Happens' insurance policy.

-When does the policy start?

-You can see here, it started in March.

OK, March 22nd, my sister's birthday, lovely.

Right, I will tell you what gets me here.

If somebody takes out a policy, protection policy, and it is called

Whatever Happens Care Plan, surely whatever happens should be covered.

Or should this policy be called something different,

like, Whatever Happens Unless We Disagree With Your Claim?

I've had a closer look at Manish's policy

and it says it offers him "protection

"against breakdown and mishap. You won't pay a penny extra. Labour,

"parts and general advice are included

"and we'll fix it or we'll replace it."

There's one exclusion which states,

"they will not repair or replace the laptop if the cost

"of repairing or replacing a product which fails because anyone neglects,

"abuses or misuses the product."

Right, let's put in a call to Currys.

I've been advised the best person to speak to is in the PR department,

so here goes.

DIAL TONE

Going to go to voice mail.

-I can feel it in my water.

-Please leave your message after the tone.

To re-record your message, key hash at any time.

Hi, there, it's Dominic Littlewood calling from

Don't Get Done Get Dom for the BBC.

I leave him my contact details.

I just wanted to have a chat with you about Manish Sharma's

laptop and I wonder if you could give me a call back as soon as possible, please?

Much appreciated, thanks very much, bye-bye. Always be polite.

No reason not to be, really. Just wait for him to call me back.

I hate voice mails.

Right!

With Christine, I'm sending her off on a little mission.

As neither company has even looked at her broken tablet to give it

an accurate diagnosis, I've arranged for her

and her tablet to visit an IT expert

to see what he has to say about it...

What I'm looking forward to today is that someone is finally going

to look at the tablet and actually tell me what is wrong.

-Hi, how can I help?

-I've actually brought my tablet in,

because I purchased it for a Christmas present for £135.

And it's not fully charged properly.

Christine then outlines her back and forth battle with Currys and HP and

also tells our IT expert that she's been quoted £310 to fix the tablet.

Ouch!

It's just not charging, and I just want to find out...

That's fine, I'll have a quick look for you now. Just give me a couple of moments.

I'll just have a quick check for you.

What we're looking for is if the charging unit is broken or not,

which, a lot of people damage the charging block,

so what I'm going to do is put a charger in.

That seems fine. And now, I'm going to fiddle it.

As you can see, it's not moving,

and I think that means that the charging unit is fine.

It seems like a manufacturer's fault.

-So, it should be covered under the 12 months warranty.

-Interesting.

What would have to be done to fix the fault?

We need to open the products, the HP tablet up,

and actually fix that underneath the tablet.

And put it together again. And that should resolve the problem.

It's an easy fix for us. From the customer's point of view, it isn't,

but first, yeah, it's an easy one, we do it every single day,

different tablets, different mobile phones. Hi, Christine.

I just had a little look at it.

Basically, I put the charger in and it seems like the part itself is faulty.

It's not broken in any way, so, I recommend that you go back to the

manufacturers, HP, or you can go back to Currys and see what they say.

-Right, OK, then.

-Otherwise, we can repair it for you,

but at a fraction of the cost they quoted you, about £40.

I can't believe that they actually haven't looked at it.

Is that something that you've heard of before?

No, it's the first time. I've never come across something like this.

It's a two-minute thing, really, they should have checked it for you or had a quick look and they

-should have explained to you that, you know, it is a faulty part.

-Right, well,

thanks ever so much for your help, then, because obviously,

I've not known what was wrong before, and it is just nice

to actually know, and I can go back and see what I can sort out.

-That's fine, you're welcome.

-Thank you.

-Thank you very much.

So there you have it, according to one tech expert,

Christine appears to have been right all along.

By bringing my tablet here, I've got an answer straightaway, where

as Currys and HP didn't even look at it and tell me what the problem was.

I've heard back from Currys about Manish's case.

They've said the damage to his laptop was inconsistent with

what he said had happened.

So, I said, OK, what do you think has happened?

And they said the damage is so severe,

it seems unlikely it was caused by falling off a table.

So, I have now put in a formal request for a copy of the report,

something which Manish has never seen.

Fingers crossed we will get it.

I want to know how Currys came to that conclusion?

How do they decide if the damage a customer states is an accident,

or if it was misuse?

Let's meet an electrical testing expert who knows his hard

drives from his hard luck stories. And the first thing

I'd like to know is do customers try their luck when making

an insurance claim?

On a daily basis, we have customers coming into us

who try to pass off physical damaged products where they can

sometimes clearly know it is physical damage, as a manufacturing defect.

Things like broken screens, liquid contamination, that kind of stuff.

But there must be a bit of a grey area as far as

knowing whether it was an accident or the customer's fault?

From an insurance perspective, that differentiation becomes

important, negligent or accidental damage.

Now, the insurance company is going to base that entirely upon

the information that the customer gives them,

so if you tell them that I was in the swimming pool using my mobile

phone, and it got wet, then, clearly, you have given them

the information that this is not an accident, this was negligent

behaviour, and they're not going to probably pay that claim.

If, however, you say you were walking along the street and you dropped

your laptop in a puddle and it's got wet, then that is accidental damage.

Now, you haven't wilfully damaged the product.

Here we have a very good example of physical damage.

Modern screens don't shatter, it's a laminate material,

so when they break, they record a history of the damage.

So, you can see here, the two impact points are just there and there.

The glass has shattered and spread out from the impact point,

so this is clearly not a manufacturing issue,

this item has been dropped or damaged in some way.

Some issues are quite obvious, for example, if we open up a laptop and

there is mould growing inside, then that is clearly liquid contamination.

In other instances, it is not as clear-cut as that,

so what we can ascertain is the damage and the extent of that

damage, but we cannot really tell how that was caused.

So in Manish's case, he claims the laptop was knocked off a table

onto a hard floor. However, Currys dispute this.

Typically, when a laptop is knocked off the table when it is plugged in,

you will get a broken DC socket, you would get a broken screen, damage

to the casing of the product. Without having seen this product myself,

the bottom line is, it was accidental damage, it wasn't wilfully done.

So, the insurance company should pay for that.

Amir has described near enough down to a T the damage on Manish's

laptop, so what about Christine's case? Both the retailer

and the manufacturer haven't even bothered to look at

her tablet and have already decided it was not a manufacturing issue.

I'm not sure how someone can assess a product without having it checked by

an authorised engineer, so, what I would suggest is that the customer

go back to the store and ask them to look at the whole situation again.

And is there any advice he would give people

to help prove their case?

If you have any kind of dispute for a physically damaged product,

get an independent assessment done by an authorised repair agent.

Now, that assessment will either validate your claim or

-validate the manufacturer's claim.

-And finally, how can you tell

the difference between a manufacturing fault against misuse?

From my over 20 years of experience,

physical damage is normally quite evident.

You'll either see signs of liquid

contamination inside the product or you will see something that is

burnt or essentially, you will see physical damage to the product.

So, for me, it is quite clear cut.

If there is no physical damage, if there is no liquid damage,

there's no signs of the product being tampered with,

I would treat that as a manufacturing defect.

This supports our independent IT expert's

hands-on inspection of Christine's tablet.

Manish took out a policy that he believed would

cover his laptop for any eventuality.

So are these policies really worth taking out?

I'm off to find out from The Ombudsman.

What I'm keen to have a chat with you about, Dave,

-is about accidental insurance cover.

-And what accidental is?

I've got to ask your opinion of it. Right.

We're here to talk about accidental damage.

Which is black and white as far as it sounds, but it is not, is it?

It's not.

I think a good starting point with accidental damage is this

is about insurance for spillages and breakages.

So, spillages and breakages,

technically it covers everything to do with accidental damage?

That's right.

What it doesn't cover is absolutely anything that happens to you,

and I think that is the basic misunderstanding that gives

-rise to lots of problems in this area.

-Can you expand on that?

On one hand, you've got an insurance policy that is very

precise and very technical about certain

circumstances where the insurance will pay. On the other hand,

you've got a lot of consumers who just think it's peace of mind for

anything that ever happens to their sofa or their new laptop computer.

And it's kind of two different worlds,

two different parallel universes.

And they collide, and that's usually where we get

a dispute that the ombudsman has to sort out.

-I bet there's a lot of disputes, isn't there?

-Hundreds of these disputes.

Usually, it's at the point of a claim, when something happens to your sofa

or laptop, and you think, that's OK, I've got insurance to cover it.

And that's probably the first time you might be

looking in detail at your policy or indeed your claim is rejected,

and that really makes you focus on well, why has it been rejected?

I thought accidental meant anything that is an accident?

There are different levels of accidental damage cover, though, aren't there? There's a general one,

then you can have the one where EVERYTHING is covered.

There's different sorts of policies you can take out?

I think that's the general rule with insurance as well.

Most of us assume that they're just standard products

and one is like another.

And every single policy is unique and will have all kinds of terms

and conditions that might make it very different to

what your understanding of the more general word accidental meant.

I think it's time to get a firm definition of the term accident.

What exactly is an accident?

Well, insurance companies would be very clear about that.

They'll say technically, an accident is something that is unintended

and unforeseen, and that makes it sound like a very neat box ticked.

That's a helpful starting point.

But it's, what does that really mean in the chaotic,

confusing circumstances of most people's everyday lives?

One of the people I'm trying to help had an accident

where his laptop fell off the kitchen worktop. That was unforeseen and unintended,

but somebody in the insurance company said to him, we're not covering that,

because the damage wasn't consistent.

What right does that person sitting in an office have to say that

-to one of their customers?

-Well, that would be the very question

that we would ask the ombudsman.

We'd say to the insurance company, how did you arrive at that decision?

How did you go from your technical definition of an accident to

applying that to a set of circumstances?

What did you look at? What did you consider?

So, we call for the evidence, and the insurance company,

by law, has to give us an explanation.

Why has an insurance company even said that in the first place, if this is the case?

Are they hoping that that person is going to accept that

and just they get away with paying out a claim?

Are they taking that gamble that if they go to you, you'll probably overrule it.

Sadly, it is certainly true that a lot of people,

at the first rebuff, will just give up and not pursue matters.

David, you are a wealth of knowledge.

-Thank you very much indeed.

-A pleasure as always.

Persistence pays, and I have an abundance of it.

I think the important point here that we can all take

home from my chat with David is that these policies might seem

great on the surface, but might not actually suit your needs.

You need to have a look at them. You DO need to make the effort to read the small print

and find out whether it actually suits you.

Nothing worse than finding a huge pile of bills on your doormat.

But when you're getting chased for money you don't even owe,

well, that's left some of you seeing red,

and I'm not talking about the final demand.

Penny Clark has lived

in her home in Scarborough for 15 years, and gets her gas

from Npower, but just over a year ago, she received a bill

-from British Gas.

-Well, when I got the first bill,

I didn't really think anything much of it, it was for £4.64,

it didn't have my name on it, it just said the occupier.

I knew I didn't get my gas from British Gas.

It didn't seem to be too much of a problem.

I didn't actually do anything at all about it, I just thought, oh,

well, they've got it wrong, who could use £4.64 worth of gas

and be sent a bill for it?

And these bills kept dropping through her letter box.

When the bills went up to about £100, I realised that even though

it was a mistake, I was going to have to do something about it.

So she called British Gas.

Every phone call takes for ever. You hear a lot of music.

You get passed from person to person.

The first person that I told that I didn't

get my gas from British Gas, but I'd had a bill,

they said, yes, you DO get your gas from British Gas.

Eventually, after a long time, they agreed that actually, no,

I didn't, it was a mistake.

However, Penny's call to British Gas didn't seem

-to make any difference.

-They kept sending bills.

And they were going up and up and I was becoming extremely concerned,

especially as they started to become more and more threatening.

She then got an unexpected visit from a British Gas engineer.

They just sent somebody who walked up the garden path

and looked at the meter.

And he said it was the wrong one, it was the wrong serial number.

Well, I'm the only person who has ever lived in this house

and I have lived here for 15 years. And I haven't had a new meter.

But, it didn't seem to make any difference to the bills.

The bills now totalled over £2,600.

I was becoming terrified.

Every time a letter came through the door, I would be worrying that it

was going to be some huge amount, but I couldn't seem to stop it.

And they didn't seem to be interested in stopping it.

I remember how awful I felt every time another one of them arrived.

And these other letters are worse.

These are the ones, notice of disconnection,

mention of taking me to court to get access to the property.

Which is exactly what happened to Sarah Forster from Newcastle.

She turned up at her house only to discover British Gas

had let themselves in!

There's a tiny little hole where the locksmith that they had

brought has drilled in, basically, to pick our lock

and come into our house.

Unfortunately, as he's done it, he's damaged a mechanism inside,

which caused our door to eventually not open, and this is

obviously why we needed to get both the locks, top and bottom, replaced.

British Gas had installed a meter in the house

because there was an outstanding debt of £2,500.

The only correspondence they left was a note addressed to the

'the occupant' in a folded up piece of paper.

Sarah and her husband had only just bought the house a few days ago

and knew the debt could not possibly be theirs

so got straight on the phone to British Gas.

They told her it would be quite straightforward to get

the meter taken out if the couple could prove

they weren't living at the property at the time.

British Gas also said Sarah could claim the money

back for the locksmith.

However, weeks went by and the gas meter was still there.

Now at their wits' end with British Gas, Sarah just wanted to be

rid of them, so decided to change company.

She found a new energy provider who was happy to take the meter out,

but they would have to charge her £52.

Sarah was so unhappy with British Gas,

she instructed them to go ahead and do it,

and is now happy in her new home, albeit £52 out of pocket.

As for Penny and her ongoing dispute with British Gas, she'd had a visit

-from the bailiffs.

-Actually, he was extremely pleasant,

and he realised straightaway that it was a mistake and he did

say that he would try to sort it out for me, because clearly, I was

not living in a block of flats, which is what he had been led to expect.

He could tell it was a mistake. But, it didn't stop the bills coming.

Nothing seemed to stop British Gas sending me more and more bills.

After almost a year of complaining and the bills

continuing to soar, Penny decided

to go to the head honcho of British Gas.

After I wrote to the Chief Executive,

they did put me in touch with an extremely nice complaints

lady from British Gas who was, you know, lovely, and helpful.

Just what you need. Over a year after the first bill,

and countless phone calls to British Gas,

the letters did eventually stop.

I'm always on tenterhooks waiting to see

if another bill is going to come, certainly, if it's got a

British Gas sticker on the envelope, I don't really want to open it!

I can understand.

We contacted British Gas and outlined both of these cases.

For Sarah, they did reimburse her for the cost of replacing the meter

and had this to say...

For Penny, British Gas has reassured us that she

will not continue to receive bills in the future and she owes nothing.

When questioned on the reasons how this mistake was made,

British Gas said...

Sometimes a company just puts their hands up and says,

do you know what, we made a mistake, and we're going to put it right.

And I like it when that happens.

I'm on a mission to help two people who bought products from Currys,

but were told they had misused their gadgets when they put in claims.

Christine under her warranty and Manish for accidental damage.

They should call it a joke policy. It's just a joke. It's nothing else.

Looking at Manish's case for accidental damage, how have Currys

come to the conclusion that he may be

being economical with the truth?

Take this term "misuse".

I mean, how on earth can the experts tell

the difference between misuse and a genuine accident?

I mean, take these two plates for example.

Now, if I went yaaawwwwwn...

Ooh! That was a genuine accident.

Take this second one, however, and...

Ooops! Misuse.

Now, they both look pretty smashed up to me.

Now, I certainly can't tell the difference between the two.

How on earth can the experts?

There's been no sign of the report from the Currys repair lab that

I asked for, but we have had an e-mail from Currys.

They have an offer for Manish, so I'm off to see him

and see what he makes of it.

This case should be black and white.

Someone buys an expensive laptop, they take out accidental damage

and they have an accident, so the insurance pays out, right? Wrong.

It's not black and white at all.

-Hi, Manish.

-Hi, Dominic.

-Nice to meet you, you all right?

Can I come in? Thanks very much.

That laptop you bought was nearly a year ago now,

so, of course, it's out of date, it's been superseded, the later

models are quicker, faster, better and probably lower in price.

-Remind me how much you paid for the first laptop?

-£629.

Yes. A lot of money.

Especially considering it's smashed up and in theory,

you're getting nothing for it.

Well, we've been on the phone to Currys.

We've tried to sort things out with their press office

and we've eventually got an answer from them.

Now, they're not happy with the fact that you weren't given a new

laptop when you should have been under this insurance policy

and they would like me to give you this.

It's not the golden envelope, it's what's in it that counts.

-That's brilliant.

-Have you seen how much it's for?

-Yes.

-£750.

-£750.

-Yeah, what do you think about that?

-That's brilliant.

I wasn't expecting this. I seriously wasn't expecting this.

That's brilliant, what they've done.

-That's £120 more than you paid for it.

-Yes.

Which I would like to think is probably their way of saying, look,

you know, go and get yourself a nice laptop even when you need one.

-That'll more than cover for it and all your inconvenience.

-Yeah.

-I think they've done the decent thing there.

-Definitely.

-Right.

They'll be watching. Tell them what you think of Currys now.

The thing is, if they'd done it in the first place,

-I wouldn't have had to come here.

-Yeah.

-You know.

It was a genuine case and it wasn't, I wasn't doing wrong,

but, it never would have got to you being involved to get this result.

-At the end of the day.

-Yes.

And I think that's a good lesson for them and for a lot

of other companies out there as well. It shouldn't take me getting

involved to try and get these things sorted out. It should happen way

-down the line.

-Yeah.

-We're making small steps in the right direction,

but anyway, Currys made a big step there for you, haven't they?

-750 smackers. Happy?

-I'm happy.

-So am I.

Thanks, Dominic. All because of you. All because of you.

Yeah, but at the end of the day, you contacted me, we sorted things out,

hopefully, we've highlighted an issue

-and it won't happen again for anybody else.

-That's brilliant.

-So, am I free to go?

-Yeah.

-Great. I'll get on me bike then!

-No worries!

-Nice to meet you!

-Take care.

-Thank you.

Currys have done the right thing.

-I'm happy with the amount of money they gave me.

-So am I.

We asked Currys to comment on Manish's

case and they had this to say...

Great! One down, one to go,

and it's not just accidental damage being branded as misuse.

My investigations suggest that Christine's tablet DID have a

manufacturing issue, BUT both retailer Currys and manufacturer HP

diagnosed it as misuse, without actually taking a look at it.

Well, Currys has got back to me on this one too

and they've told me...

And not only that, there's an offer on the table which Christine and her

son have received.

"As a gesture of goodwill,

"we would be happy to organise a replacement for her tablet.

"We're sorry for any inconvenience caused."

-So you're going to get a new tablet! All right?

-Yes.

-Yeah. Are you glad?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

I'm just glad that something's been done and I can finally resolve it and get back to normal!

I'm absolutely ecstatic, I'm just so glad that it's all sorted

and we can finally, I can finally relax a bit more!

Instead of having to chase up and find out what's happening.

Currys said that in Christine's case...

"If a product is in warranty, we will ask the customer to send it

"back to HP so that we can diagnose and remedy the problem correctly."

I would like to say thanks ever so much to Dom

and without his help, I'm sure this wouldn't have been done,

and I'm really, really grateful to him

and in the end, I think Currys have seen right and I'm glad

and maybe I may think about going back there shopping again!

Well done, Currys, you've rebooted Manish's

and Christine's confidence in you.