Happy Easter my fellow readers and what an Easter this has been.
The mercury has been falling to a chilling -11OC, the snow is falling all around us, shops are shutting early with confusing seasonal opening hours and rail services are grinding to a halt. If it wasn’t for the fact the shelves were awash with Easter Eggs you’d be forgiven for thinking this was Christmas.
In a departure from my usual rantings, mainly about my love life I’ve decided that rather than rant and moan I should attempt something more productive and offer my services in trying to help my brothers and sisters, not with their love life but rather with their issues of consumer rights. A good example of a large section of the population with a valid gripe would be anyone with the misfortune to be a regular train commuter. I imagine anyone reading this who knows all too well how easily a face can fit snugly into another persons armpit or how a luggage rack can be a very attractive looking seat will consider themselves worthy of the badge of honour of being a commuter.
Those with particular angst and wanting some redress but getting stonewalled are those poor commuters who were stuck on the trains in and around Lewisham last month, stuck in sub zero temperatures and forced to urinate and soil themselves while being locked inside an ice box with no power for several hours. It is their situation more than any that has encouraged me to write this and next week’s blog, as a means to help them and potentially anyone else reading this.
As anyone will know from either reading my past blog about London Midland or from hearing me rant in person, I am no fan of the way in which our railways are run. My particular angst comes from the fact that train operators run monopolies with no incentive to improve, they regularly under staff and cut services back to the bone so badly that a falling leaf in Liverpool delaying a train by all of around 30 seconds means the whole of the network in Kent goes to absolute excrement due to “displaced staff.”
This alone is bad enough but it is then compounded by the shoddy customer service you have to contend with when you try to claim some redress for being delayed. Not only are you delayed and waste a large portion of your life on delayed and overcrowded trains but you then have to devote more time and energy to fight for the flimsy crumbs they throw at you as compensation.
Should you ever try to invoke the powers of the regulator or heaven forbid the people who actually run the show, namely the government department of the DfT, then they start waxing lyrical with the standard rhetoric getting spun of how privatisation has worked and improved matters for everyone, often encouraging us to remember the curly British Rail sandwich as a token image of how bad things were back then and how they’ve improved nowadays.
This image might actually resonate with me and work, if this was actually a sandwich firm that they were running and my complaint in any way related to the quality of the sandwich, as it happens most services nowadays have had Rail Gourmet trolley services axed so we have gone from having a curly sandwich to no sandwich at all. This is an improvement along the same lines of the lights are on but no one is home evolving into the house has been invaded and taken over by illegal squatters, there has been a power cut and the light bulb is the wrong fitting and won’t fit the socket, but as it’s an energy saving light bulb ergo it’s all somehow better.
I found myself appropriately frustrated some years ago by the poor services offered by our railways, I managed to inadvertently recreate the great train robbery, in so much as I had the misfortune to board a train on the West Coast Mainline and ended up getting totally fleeced by a bunch of shysters and chancers also known as Go-via, a subsidiary of the Go-Ahead Group. Despite the negative build up that I’m giving all of this, the story does have a happy ending though so please try to stay with me here as I promise it will be worth it.
Now to set the scene, if I can ask you to cast your mind back and try to picture the era in which our story is set, Planet of the Apes dominates the cinema screens, David Bowie wins a Brit Award, the new Ford Ecosport hits the showrooms as an affordable SUV for the masses, the Samsung Galaxy S5 is the must have smartphone and Downing Street has David Cameron in residence as happy as a pig in….err probably best we don’t go any further with that analogy! But yes people, for those of you that can remember that far back and got the year correct, it’s that long bygone era of 2014, the month of May to be exact.
Back then I was tasked to undertake some top secret and covert work at several locations across the west midlands using secret cameras and filming equipment to see how well front line operations were running.
Ok maybe I exaggerate my importance, as many of my regular readers will know I’m nothing so glamorous and it’s mystery shopping work that I’m most renowned for. Today’s secret mission was pet shops as my boss at the time was something of a cat lover. He was always sending me out on these odd-jobs and today my secret mission was that I had to purchase treats for cats and items to clean up cat excrement or as my boss called it, cat doo-doo. I can’t say that I am a fan of these jobs that involve working with doo-doo for the obvious health and safety reasons but my boss loved it and insisted that working with doo-doo was actually safer than not working with it. I’d never quite figured that one out but hey, what do I know?
Anyway I digress, I arrived at my departure station of Northampton and my initial train to Birmingham was on time and moreover it had an available seat for me so all seemed well, but no sooner had we embarked upon our journey north than the ubiquitous shrieking announcement voice comes on like a foghorn, altogether quite fitting as my MP3 player was playing Vienna singing out about “A voice reaching out in a piercing cry, It stays with you until…” the booming but yet altogether insincere voice started with an apology which is never a promising start when you’re 90 seconds into a journey! They announced that this fully working and fully staffed train that was running nicely from Northampton was now to be cancelled on route at Coventry due to lack of staff.
This was as perplexing for me as I’m sure it is for you the reader as surely it currently had staff now as it was running?? What disaster could be due to occur that would mean the member of staff was no longer around? Had he thrown in towel and was quitting, and if so why at Coventry? Perhaps his bosses wanted to ignore him and recommended sending him to Coventry and this got lost in translation? Perhaps he had been afflicted with the “unusually high level of sickness” epidemic that strikes totally without warning, only afflicts train crew and also erases all paperwork and evidence to quantify it to transport select committees? Or perhaps worse still could it be that this crew member was on the brink of death and about to turn into some form of spectre within the hour.
Whatever the reason, this short notice cancellation forced a route change at Rugby for me. The train that I needed to catch at Rugby was also delayed and this was really starting to impact my day. If I lost much more time then I wouldn’t have enough time to mystery shop my pet stores. The bottom line for me is that I still had bills to pay and if I didn’t complete the visits then I wouldn’t get paid and this could break me. Reputation is everything in this industry and if I failed all my visits and told my boss that then I might as well get the hell out of his industry, after all you can’t argue with a superior force.
As it happens I did manage to do my initial visits but the service coming back home was cancelled due to the old chestnut of “waiting for a member of train crew” forcing me to wait an extra hour to return and miss out on extra work. Zut alors, zut alors indeed!
The extra hour did give me time to ponder why, if Go-via were waiting for this member of train crew, that they cancelled the service, surely if he got a shimmy on and arrived at the station to find his train he was driving was cancelled he would be as miffed as the rest of us? While I never got to the bottom of this conundrum, the only silver living was that a delay of over an hour meant I get a full refund on my ticket of £20. This is less than what I lost in missed visits but might as well claim it back.
A few days and several cups of coffee later while back at home I set about trying to deduce and complete the labyrinthine form on the website that is required in order for me to get my refund that I was entitled to and I duly wasted another 17 minutes of my life navigating this new and improved website that had been “modernised.” I considered how basic and original website designs worked so much better, but this website now had so many useless and superfluous things added onto it to confuse and slow me down. The delay form itself looked it had undergone the biggest modernisation since it was first launched in the Victorian era, but sadly not for the better I thought. Once this was completed I was shortly emailed a case reference telling me this had been logged and it was due to be paid back within 28 days. I could now sum total that only a few hours of my life had been wasted and I could move on, oh how wrong was I….
Now we fast forward 3 months to August 2014 and it was clear the complaints services was as inefficient as the train service as I did not have my £20 back nor did I even have any explanation why not. This needed to be followed up! An email was hastily fired off where I vented my spleen and made demands for my measly £20 to be paid to me.
I got a reply some 4 days later telling me there were no delays! Did my eyes deceive me when reading the display boards, had Go-via made a simple error or was this a scurrilous lie? I’ll let you read on and then you can decide.
As you can see I had some email banter back and forth with their customer relations team, the name alone was quite ironic as our interactions did nothing positive for my relationship with the company as one of their customers. Rather than apologise for ignoring me and lying to me, they told me that they needed evidence before payment could be made as their records showed no delays. What records were these people looking at? Were there 2 sets of records that were kept, 1 to fob off paying for delay repay and another set of “real” records for when finally caught out?
What evidence realistically could one provide in order to prove a train did not arrive? An empty platform, a series of suitable pissed off Snapchat selfies on a station platform? How does one actually prove a negative?
While usually I had neither the patience nor the crayons to deal with this level of stupidity and obfuscation from a faceless email account, on this occasion I’d luckily had the foresight to photograph the display boards. These display boards for my journey showed the cancellation and photographing them helped pass the excruciatingly boring hour long wait, given that I had exhausted all the tourist options available to me in the heady heights of the waiting room at Tamworth Railway Station rather quickly. I duly sent my evidence in and somewhat stupidly, I assumed they would fold when they got this, but the tactics reverted back to just ignoring me.
I posted on their social media page, this was quasi-ignored as while it got a reply, it was one telling me nothing would be done as apparently this page was only for marketing and they didn’t deal with complaints.
I then emailed the big cheese in charge telling him that as we were now in September I wanted my £20 back and more for the time I had wasted.
You can probably already see the recurring theme here, and you’d be right too as this email got ignored too. I wondered how a company can be run and continue to make money where people at the bottom level lie and then people at the top level ignore problems, but I guess when you’re running a monopoly normal rules don’t apply.
Giving Go-via the benefit of the doubt I then thought that perhaps it was a staffing issue, I then contemplated the possibility that I had not been emailing several different people but perhaps instead I had in fact only been dealing with one person assuming pseudonyms to fill all the different roles. If this were the case and it was resource rather than rudeness that was the reason for radio silence, then I became minded if they shouldn’t undertake some form of large recruitment drive to solve their staffing issues, perhaps go all out and make it one of the largest recruitment drives that the UK had ever seen? Sadly it turned out that in the same way that their lethargic train services operated, I too was a little late to the party and an existing recruitment drive by Go-via was already underway and had been for some time, so long in fact it seemed like I could trace its origins all the way back to the Doomsday book.
So with communications as frequent and reliable as the trains this really left me with little option. Go-via seemed to think that they were in the driving seat here and by ignoring me now they could control the problem and make it go away.
With most normal people, when being constantly ignored they run out of steam and patience to carry on such matters and end up letting the other party get away with what they have done, for someone like me who can hold a grudge like it’s an Olympic sport then being ignored as means of dealing with a valid complaint when I’ve been wronged means that all hell has a tendency to break loose….
I went for broke and decided to get redress through the courts and issued a court claim citing amongst other things, Fraud by false representation contrary to The Fraud Act 2006. Considering how I had been lied to, lost money and wasted a considerable amount of my time, I included what I felt was a proportional level of compensation that I was entitled to, and thus increasing my £20 train ticket to £285, a figure which included the £25 I had to pay to submit my court claim.
Now with the courts giving a 14 day deadline for replying lest you get a CCJ against you, this increased level of urgency did end up lighting a fire under their lazy backsides.
I got inbox replies from the marketing team, I got email replies from customer relations team, I got new emails from customer relations team, I got apology emails from the big cheese’s PA, I even got emails from an audit manager called Ben whom I’d never had any dealings with before. It seems that issuing a court claim is a sure fire to ensure you get multiple emails in quick succession, if only there was an equally easy way to magically conjure up so many multiple trains this quickly….
As you can see from this email this audit manager Ben at no point makes any quibble about the amount, apologising to me for my experience and then goes onto tell me he’s sending me a cheque for £300, quite the result when my claim is only for £285! He finishes by saying how he’ll let the court know.
When a claim like this is not denied and is paid in full, the court then file what is called a Judgement by admission, which in laymen’s terms mean they held their hands up to everything I claimed with no disputing.
Now when Her Majesty’s Court and Tribunal Services has an official legal document on the register of CCJs showing I claimed they lied and committed fraud by false representation and how I was entitled to compensation, and the train company paid this and admitted this you’d think this is pretty cut and dry?
Alas no as since then I’ve had to take the same train company to task on more than occasion and in a subsequent claim last year they even have the nerve to say not only did they never admit to any of this, but they go onto say they never actually lied and in effect accuse me of being a liar for suggesting this demanding proof of my allegations and ranting on about how the claim should be thrown out.
I’ve scanned in and cut together all the relevant paragraphs below for you to see how blatantly they lie.
Normally I’d be able to overlook and forgive a simple error, as when you work for a big company with employees numbering in the thousands, you often get ordered to say and sign stuff on the basis it’s true to the best of your knowledge so you can be forgiven for making an oversight about something someone else may have said years ago that you were none the wiser about. What makes this litany of lies so priceless is that this defence is signed by the very same audit manager Ben. Yup that’s right, the same guy who sent me a cheque in 2014 admitting everything and apologising and who confirmed to the court that a judgement should be filed against the train company.
There are only 2 possible answers here, either this man is lying so much that his undergarments are aflame to such an extreme that they could be used as a training ground for the pits of Hades or that he is a man of such stupidity and ineptitude that he had no concept of what he was admitting to in 2014 or what the long term consequences of admitting to committing fraud were, so much so that the only people to now even entertain his ramblings seriously are the flat earth society.
All in all this level of bare faced deceit and flexibility when it comes to the truth all in the name of increasing their own profits should demonstrate what you’re dealing with when you dare to demand the advertised service that you pay for, and then try to challenge a train company for not providing this and lying to cover up their failings.
When it’s this tough to get what you pay for then trying to get redress when you’re stuck on a train or worse end up losing a job through constant lateness caused by the train companies is an uphill battle against an adversary with seemingly limitless resources.
In the spirit of helping my fellow commuters out I’ve decided to put together a “how to” guide from my own experiences that breaks down any successes that have worked, some template forms along with the aforementioned defence from the Go-Ahead Group last year which has been fully dissected and laid out showing EXACTLY how they or any other train company will try to defend against the new legislation of the Consumer Rights Act.
I don’t claim to be a solicitor or any kind of expert, I’m just an ordinary commuter like the rest of you that got sick of being ripped off and lied to by train companies and chose to take matters into my own hands and ended up having some small victories against them. I want to share my knowledge and experience freely to help others in the same situation.
So if my story of being messed about and lied to has resonated with you or you feel that you can’t possibly hope to fight a company that lie so blatantly and get away with it or you just want to know how to correctly complain and the process for how to issue a claim then I hope next week’s blog is of some use to you.
Along with a how to guide, I’ll be issuing a copy of the defence from the Go-Ahead Group’s solicitor, showing not just how often and how far a train operator will lie in order to protect their profits, but showing what line of defence they will take that may help you anticipate and craft a much tighter claim.
So if you want to know more then please keep an eye on my blog as my how to guide is scheduled to arrive at 16:00 on Friday 20th April, and unlike the train timetables, this is one train service that you can rely on for being on time.
roguetrader1980 