Yes, I do understand that the payment rate is typically averaged over the year. I just find it disturbing that Southern are prepared to demand the full payment when she is, apparently, either two or four entire months ahead at present, and is due for a reduction anyway. For reference, if she really is £200 ahead and got this back, it would completely wipe out her bank overdraft, which would help her a great deal at this point. I'll be able to decide what to do when I see her bills tomorrow. ETA: one thing that might explain why she's so far ahead at this point, is that I helped her implement some energy-saving measures a while ago. These included a pile of CFL bulbs, setting the heating to a constant 21°C instead of alternating between 20 and 25, and trying to use less hot bathwater.

The "costs less at night" tariff is usually called Economy 7. It's normally used in areas where the local Grid is heavily overworked during business hours, but there is surplus energy being produced in the evenings. Nuclear and coal plants are quite difficult to change the output of quickly, which is why the latter situation exists. The tariff charges more than normal during the day to encourage economising, but then charges less during the night so that people can charge up storage-heaters cheaply using the surplus. This is, in fact, why storage heaters exist at all. However, the heaters must be properly set up to make best use of the situation. They usually have their own clocks, which must be set to the correct time, and the triggers set in line with the tariff thresholds. If you or your friend need advice on how to set them up, or are concerned that they are in poor condition, I do advise finding an experienced fitter. I haven't used one myself, so I can't help directly! Both electricity and gas tend to be charged per kWh these days, which makes it easy to compare the cost of doing your heating either way. You might find that Economy 7's night tariff is so cheap that electricity is the right way to do most of your heating. You might also find that gas is cheaper during the day, if your storage heaters aren't completely up to the job. Heating is the one application where electricity is just as efficient as gas, so you can compare kWh for kWh quite effectively.

My English friend is in difficulty again. Some time ago, her ex-partner moved out, having failed to pay utility bills for a while (and several other financial offences). This left my friend, JC, with large balances to repay on a fixed income. This she has, apparently, managed to do. I have encouraged her to change energy suppliers. Southern are, predictably, not the cheapest supplier - for electricity or gas - for the North Yorkshire town she lives in. She's put this off because dealing with businesses is stressful for her. She's a weak and slow reader, so she usually hasn't bothered reading her bills - if anything, she relies on her mother to interpret them, which is not necessarily reliable. It seems that the electricity and gas bills were being paid at a rate of £50 per month each, on Direct Debit. Doubtless this relatively high rate was to support the repayment of the outstanding debt. This has been very difficult for JC to pay, but she has managed with some help from myself and her mother. However, this rate has not yet been reduced, despite the debt being acknowledged as repaid. JC told me that she expected the rate to be reduced from about now on, but she has just received some kind of letter "demanding" the £50 for each service. The demand is unusual, given that it is on Direct Debit, but the poor state of her bank account may be relevant. What concerns me is that, apparently, somebody came to read the meters in mid-December, and noticed somehow that what she had been paying was too high, and that the account was at that point £200 in credit. I don't know why she only told me this now, rather than at the time. All this is for a small council house, which JC lives in with her young daughter. (I don't know if she qualifies for the cold-weather bonus - I hope so.) However, I have asked her to show me the most recent bills, which arrived recently and which - for a change - she has kept hold of. I'll also ask to see the demand letter. I should get to see them tomorrow. Have other people had experience with payment rates out-of-kilter with actual consumption? I'd heard rumours about it before, but I don't see very much in concrete.

Based on my friend's recent experience, they respond better to (well-written) letters than to phone calls. I strongly suspect the call centre is offshored and has no power to actually do anything - but they are expert, or rather stubborn, at pretending they do. Indeed I suspect they can only guess at what the problem might be, rather than having access to useful information. But writing a letter sorted out her billing problem immediately.

If I were you, I would call up a CORGI gas man and get the emergency repairs done. I think you've gone out of your way to do the right thing, so you're well within your rights to at least get your hot water back on and find out just how much the "cowboy" screwed things up. When you've got a direct line to your landlady, go ahead and explain to her about the cowboy gasman, the agents' ignorance of your complaints and general unhelpfulness, etc. Explain very clearly that *she* is ultimately responsible, even though she is allowed to delegate the mechanics to an agent.

I believe the situation is that since he is under 18, any contract cannot be enforced against him. The charges would be an example of this.

I use Visa Electron because that is what you are given in Finland if you have no (local) credit history. I can confirm that it simply doesn't work with some online merchants, and works inconsistently with some others. However, it does work in most shops, and you can always withdraw cash and use that to pay.

Very misleading if you ask me. Unfortunately, all you can really do at this point is go through the long and torturous path to legal restitution. If you get so many charges that they would be swallowing up *future* benefits payments, I advise either joining the "cash economy" or opening a post-office account to receive your payments. This stops the bank from undeservedly eating your cash, and allows you to continue living.

You need to prepare a rebuttal against their defence. If you can give details of what the defence is, we can help you with that. When the stay is eventually lifted, the case may proceed very quickly afterwards. You might also apply for lifting of the stay. There are some other people doing this at the moment, and you might want to look at how they are going about it for ideas.

Definitely excessive, almost certainly illegal. It's also a very typical story around here. Please do use our advice and resources to start resolving it. Is your son 18yo yet? That might have a bearing on matters.

While I'm no longer resident in these pestered isles, I still have very good friends in Britain. This little bit of trouble comes from one of them. Recently, her relationship with her partner went downhill steeply, coinciding with her long recovery from a major operation. The partner decided it would be a good idea to, among other things, not pay the BT phone bill, and then walked out shortly before she was able to come home. So my friend came home to a house with a disconnected broadband connection - somehow BT thinks that if the *voice* bill isn't paid, they should disconnect the *broadband* first. Funny logic if you ask me. From what I understand, the various unpaid bills are now either fully paid, or on agreed "catch-up" terms, so no real problem there. My friend now has to support herself and her young daughter on a fixed income, without her partner's income to help. So one of the first things I suggested (and had been wanting to for a long time) was to switch away from AOL to a much cheaper (and, by all accounts, better quality) service from Eclipse. I think going down to £10/m from £30/m is a worthwhile improvement, yes? The trouble is, when she called AOL for a MAC, at my direction, AOL said that they couldn't issue a MAC because the line wasn't active. They said to call back "in 10 days" when the line would be active, and they would issue a MAC at that time. Obviously, she can't sign up with Eclipse until she has the MAC. I think that either AOL is trying to milk another half-month of subscription out of her, or trying to give her a cooling-off period in an attempt to retain her, or else BT is being it's usual deliberately-sluggish self. I'd be very interested to hear about any plausible means to speed up the process.

I have an idea as to what might have happened. It's a dirty trick IMHO, but this might just explain it. There are, at most ISPs now, two capacities which they allow you. The first is the "instantaneous" speed of the line, which in your case is 1 megabit per second (1Mbps) - ostensibly due to the relatively poor quality of your phone line. This is the number they usually advertise and quote. The other "capacity" is the number of gigabytes (GB) of traffic you're allowed to transfer per month - this was originally intended to stop compulsive downloaders from ruining the service for everyone else. However, you have to look very hard to notice this - it's usually under "Fair Usage Policy" or some such. Some "light user" packages have as little as 1GB of traffic allowance per month. To put that into perspective, it would take about 2 and a quarter *hours* for you to download that much on your 1Mbps line, if you got hold of a handful of large files at once. If you really have a "cheap" service due to the low 1Mbps line speed, they might have automatically put you on a "light user" tariff. It is therefore extremely easy to break that limit by accident, even with "normal" web surfing and e-mail. Especially if you have a teenage daughter! Once you break the limit, the ISP can do one of two things: they can slow down your connection so that you aren't interfering with other people, or they can simply charge you for the extra traffic. This is usually on the order of £1 to £2 per GB. They probably did the latter - this is why they said it was for "excess downloading". It sounds like they didn't make the so-called "fair usage policy" clear to you when you signed up. This is a clear no-no. Any recourse you take should probably focus on that issue.

Did they send you letters when the charges were applied? If so, I would read them again very carefully, looking for any hint that they intend the charges to be punitive, or that they believe that a breach of contract has occurred. I found it helped to compare any obviously legalese phrases with your T&Cs. If you *do* find any such hints, do tell us - we might be able to turn it into gold.

Yep, that's what's so unfair about it - and why the banks are starting to actually lose in court, after years of simply settling out-of-court at the last minute.

The best solution to "learning" is for the banks to simply refuse transactions for which there aren't enough funds, and not charge for doing so. None of this nonsense about "buffer zones", "unauthorised overdrafts" and "referral fees". This would fairly quickly teach people that they can't take what they don't own. ...oh, wait. *That's* why the banks don't already do it.

*If* they win, the court may choose to award costs either way. The point of charging orders is that you no longer have to scrounge up repayments, or repay the entire amount immediately. Instead, it is simply deducted from the future value of one of your assets, which is far less painful. I certainly think it helped me. Naturally, it would be better if they had simply accepted the repayment agreement put forward by CCCS. It would also be great if the court refuses to enforce the debt on the evidence they've given, because that gives you a lot more breathing room. More breathing room reduces stress, see?

BTW, regarding a charging order, it simply means that when you *sell* the house, they get the equity that would normally have passed to you, up to the amount claimed. It essentially converts an unsecured loan into a secured one. I had that happen once, in regard to a Council Tax debt. As it happens, I was able to sell the house for more than twice it's original value (after spending a significant amount on repairs and renovation), and the debt was thus wiped out. I still got the remaining equity, which was quite significant.

It is probably true that the size of their claim makes it ineligible for the Small Claims track. Since they are bringing the claim, I would suspect that the higher direct costs associated with this would fall on them, unless and until they win. Unfortunately I don't know anything about the other tracks. To start with, I would advise going through the most recent statements to find evidence to corroborate items 35/36 of your defence. Your first priority is to prevent them from obtaining a judgement in their favour. You should only need to find sufficient charges (of the "unpaid item", "referral fee", or "unarranged borrowing fee" types), which if removed would reduce the outstanding balance below that which they claim. In court, present these as specimens and non-exhaustive. As they say, "survival is half the battle". Only then, if you have time, should you go through your statements and identify each charge. Keep a record, in a spreadsheet or similar, of both the date and amount of each charge, which would then make it relatively easy to calculate the interest (both what they charged you, and what you can charge them if you win). There may be suitable spreadsheet templates for this in the forum resources. Finally, I strongly suggest looking closely at your personal friends to see if you can obtain a "litigation friend" among them. That might take some of the pressure off you, as they might be able to handle some of the more tedious paperwork, or think on their feet better.

In my own nastygrams (years ago), I always pointed out that settling earlier would (have) reduced their costs. They didn't listen; their loss! But their delays still cost me in terms of inconvenience. I also explicitly mentioned by financial difficulties, and they didn't listen, but it is something you can point to later. If you have immediate financial trouble, you might find it helpful to open a second account somewhere - possibly with the Post Office rather than a bank - so that you can get your benefits without them being immediately swallowed up by past charges. I personally entered the "cash economy" for several months in that situation, but that is more difficult when benefits are involved - I was working odd jobs. Somebody also mentioned a letter that you can file with the bank to request that particular sets of income are reserved for particular purposes, in this case essential living expenses. I have no idea whether this works, but it's worth a try if your next benefit comes in before you can switch accounts. As it happens, the £38 charge is also well above the £12 threshold mentioned by the OFT at some point. Hmmm...

Let's hear what the court staff say first, and worry about contingencies later if they are unhelpful.

I think that if a defence has been filed, the next step would be "allocation" where a date and location for the hearing is set. Which means you need to be ready for a hearing when it happens, which will be after the stay is lifted. If the OFT has it's way, you will probably be able to refer to it's decision in court - that's if the bank doesn't settle up pronto based on it.

Thanks steven for that clarification. Not having been in a "joint and several" situation, I wasn't aware of that detail. Does anyone have good ideas on what to do about the builder?

Sounds like a really nasty situation to me. The builder is ****, and needs to be brought to book so that he doesn't put more people in this situation. I don't know whether there is any criminal law that you could bring to bear, but you certainly have a civil breach-of-contract case that you can bring. He agreed to do something on consideration, and didn't even though you provided the consideration. Now he is failing to comply with a repayment agreement. I would consider his wife's house to be a reasonable address to serve notices at, since you know he goes there regularly and that is the address you know. As others said, it should be reasonably simple to set up a Final Demand Letter and then appropriate Particulars of Claim, though they will be different from those for a bank claim. If possible, I would collar one or two of the more helpful brickies to give evidence on your behalf - it sounds like they have reason to be miffed at him too. I think it is reasonable to compensate them for their trouble in attending any hearings. I won't comment on the Natwest part, as others are already helping you quite well with that. I will just say that if they have two CCJs for a single debt, that is clearly wrong and I'm certain that you could do something about it.

I've said for some time that local income taxes would be fairer than council tax. In fact, that's more or less how it's done here in Finland. There is a state income tax, a municipal tax based on a percentage of income, and optionally a church tax depending on whether you belong to a church. Even fines are usually expressed in terms of days of income.

So... you were feeling "under the weather" at around the same time as the boiler was faulty? Sounds like it *could* have been mild carbon-monoxide poisoning to me. Probably not, but...