Yes, I'm waiting for the VOA response to the email I sent them earlier today. It is the VOA I'm in contact with over this.

Thanks for posting your response, Ethel. I wasn't planning on backdating this to 1991 as I've only lived here since 1996, or 26 years ago, as my original post states. There are plenty of successful cases of people backdating their claims to the beginning of their residency on the MoneySavingExpert site, so I can't really see any reason why I should be barred from the same kind of outcome. Yes, I've been in email contact with the VOA and it is they whose initial assessment I'm challenging. In particular, my property would need to have been valued at about £8,000 more than it was in 1991 in order for it to have been put in Band C originally. As it was, it originally was worth in the lower half of Band B, so it's actually much closer to Band A than it is to Band C.

Hi, I've been paying Council tax for Band C while owning my property for the last 26 years. But I recently checked and discovered that in 1991 my property would have been worth £45,000 which puts it very firmly in Band B. I bought it for £44,000 in 1996. (Property prices actually went down in the early 1990s, which explains the apparent anomaly.) The difference between Bands B and C is £222 annually. Over 26 years this amounts to £5,772. Now I realise that I will have to compensate for the fact that council tax would have been less in previous years. Is there a quick calculator online to calculate this by using an average annual inflation percentage figure? Also, am I allowed, when claiming this money back from my council (Three Rivers Council in Hertfordshire) to add the usual statutory 8% annual interest? Any advice or help, or past experience, would be much appreciated.

Right. Good idea. Thanks.

That's a good idea, thanks, dx100uk. But I'm not sure who to send it to. EDF do not seem to publish many contact details so that is why I seem to be locked in a pointless dialogue with the same people in email and the call centre. I've also (in the last 15 minutes) discovered Customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com - but that doesn't sound like the address of an administrator to me. I suppose they think that they can tire people out and eventually their customers will just give in and pay up. Would you know of any administrator email address, or how I should go about finding it or these? Many thanks.

EDF have recently taken over my energy supply account from Utility Point. EDF said it will honour all money paid to the Utility Point account while the transition was in process, but it is obvious that they have not. There are at least two payments I made to my Utility Point account which EDF have completely ignored. I keep asking EDF for s statement, but nobody at EDF seems to understand what a statement is. Instead they send me bills which (which simply ask me to pay the same sum which is unverified). They sent me two what I can only describe as mini statements, but these were completely useless because the closing figure of the earlier statement was not the same as the starting figure of the later statement! I have asked for statement by email and lately they have taken to phoning me. So when they phone me I ask for the statement but they don't seem to know what that means. A statement, of course, would identify the missing money I paid to the transitional account - which is presumably why they are refusing to send it to me! Does anyone have any ideas on how I can contact someone at EDF who understands what a statement is? Thanks.

Just for the record, I am uploading the original letter from CCSCollect, which asks me for the money from "BT" (if it is BT). You can see here that I scribbled some notes at the foot of the letter indicating that I phoned the number CCSCollect gave me as the BT number, and I was told by "BT" that there was an outstanding balance of £48 in the account. They first tiold me that the account wasn't even closed. Then they changed their mind and told me that the account was closed, but that there was a £48 balance still owing. Assuming that I was speaking to BT, I kept telling them that the email address did not work, which is why I closed the account. I recall that I had kept telling BT at the time that the email address didn't work and that I either wanted them to fix the problem or stop charging me their PREMIUM rate charges for an email that didn't work! On the phone on this occasion the BT man I spoke to (before he called me a mother****er) had asked me if I had actually used the words "! want to cancel this account" specifically. He seemed to be saying this as an excuse for their behaviour of not closing the account when I had complained about it. However, all that is irrelevant, since what I was clearly saying was that I was NOT going to pay good money for an email account that didn't work, and that they shouldn't be charging me money for it in the first place. Later that day, though, I phoned BT using the operator number (not the number that CCSCollect had given me for BT) and spoke to someone at BT who accessed my accounts (I actually had two old accounts, one for each of the two phone lines that I needed then to do the work that my single Virgin Media account can do now) and he confirmed that neither of these showed any outstanding unpaid balance. I have a recording of that conversation. So which version is the true version? 2019-09-15 CCS letter.pdf

Will do. Thank you.

To the people who run this forum: Look, it makes absolutely no sense to censor words which contain sc@m or sc@mmer but not to censor words like 'mother****** which I know will be printed here in its original raw glory. It also detracts from the sense of what I am trying to convey to anyone who wants to know. These people are sc@mmers, and I should be able to call them sc@mmers without having to use ampersands, for God's sake!

The plot thickens. This morning I got a letter from CCSCollect headed 'NOTICE OF INTENDED ACTION'. It threatened legal action if I did not pay this money (which has now risen from £48 to £60). So we have two possible alternatives. Either BT actually swore at me, calling me an a**hole and a mother****er, OR CCSCollect are acting for a gang of [problematic]. It has to be either one or the other. So which one is it? I have scanned and uploaded this letter. (I tried phoning them just now, as they say that they are open on Saturday mornings, but I got a recorded message; bear in mind that I have spoken to CCS before and they are real.) So does anyone have any new theories about which is the true version? Is BT manned by foul-mouthed incompetents or do CCS allow themselves to be hired by [EDIT] gangs. It must be one or the other. 2019-10-17 CCS letter.pdf

Yes, I'd say the Truecall unit was probably one of my best investments.

CCS Collect sent me a letter which threatened legal action if I did not pay the £48. I then phoned CCS and spoke to a woman who sounded quite genuine and said that I should speak to the BT Billing department. She gave me the number of the BT Billing department (which I don't have to hand now) and I spoke to a man in the BT Billing department who said I owed them £48. This is in complete contrast to the conversation I had with BT last night on their 0800 800 150 number in which I was told that there were two old accounts in my name which showed a zero balance and that I did not owe BT anything. Clearly one hand does not know what the other hand is doing, as is the case with most bloated, moribund bureaucracies. Now to answer the question you have just raised, I had that department as a starred caller because I have dealt with them over many years on the various technical problems I've had with BT (both their telephone and their email). It is the number of the department that my technical complaint was escalated to after the usual BT shrugging of shoulders didn't cut it with me any more. I designated it as a starred caller because I wanted them to be able to get through to me without difficulty. I wrote "BT Newcastle Technical Complaints" as their name because they were (at the time I was dealing with them, at least) BT's technical complaints department in Newcastle. Ring their number now and see what happens. I rang it last night and I got the familiar BT recorded message.

No. It was the man from BT who used the foul language (but he did so on an undisclosed line, not on the BT Newcastle number 0800 028 5085 which he had used two minutes before to say that I owed BT £48). CCS Collect would presumably have to have got this information from somewhere. And as this is not on my credit file I'm presuming it was BT who told them. Nobody else could have such information. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm attaching a screenshot of my Truecall output to show the two called from the BT 0800 028 5085 number followed in quick succession by the same man from BT using another phone in order to send lots of static noise down the line then call me an asshole and a motherfucker. (I wonder what this forum's auto-censor will make of that.) Strange. The forum censored '[EDIT]' but not 'mother****er'. I think I might upload a recording of the call itself, just to complete the picture.

I've noticed that when I write the word 'sc@mmer' or 'sc@m' it is always replaced here by '[EDIT]' in this text. Hardly anything scandalous. Raven1, the call was not from a call centre. It was not from the 0800 028 5085 number, but from an undesignated number, as I made clear in my original post. But it followed less than a minute after the 0800 028 5085 call, it was about the same subject and it was the same voice. So the caller decided that it would be better to verbally abuse me whilst not using the company's facilities! Unfortunately he didn't know that the call was still being recorded - by me. You write "Why even take the call?" Because I want to get BT to recognise that I do not owe them any money. If I ignored it they would only call again when my guard was down. I wanted to nail this then and there. Dx100uk, you ask me why I am ringing the debt company. It is for the same reason. I want this pointless chasing of £48 to stop. I know they are not bailiffs and I know that their powers are very limited. But I wanted to know if it really was BT who had commissioned them, and they confirmed that it was. The alleged debt is less than two years old. In fact, I had made it clear to BT that the email I was paying £7.50 a month for didn't work and still they were charging me for it. They did not acknowledge that there was anything wrong with it and kept charging me for it. So in reality it is BT who owe me several months worth of their PREMIUM email "service".

The debt collector was CCSCollect. Would a [EDIT] go to the extent of passing himself off as BT and then engaging a debt collection company to collect in BT's name? What if I had capitulated and paid to CCS? CCS would then have paid the money (minus their percentage) to BT, and not to the [EDIT]. I can't see that it would be worth a [EDIT]'s time to do this. It would be pointless.