Homecare - do they really?

In the bleak midwinter, make sure you have a spare central boiler to hand...

Dear Mr Weston,

I write on behalf of my mother, the landlady of 19A Third Avenue, London E17, whose boiler broke down yesterday leaving her tenants with neither heating nor hot water. I reported the fault immediately and was assured that an engineer would call between 1200 and 1800 today, Monday 5th January. I advised the person who took the call, Nathan, that the engineer should call at 17A Third Ave in the event that nobody answered at 19A. However, both my mother, our tenant and I were on the premises all afternoon and were all surprised when, at 1800, no engineer had arrived, nor had called to cancel.

Upon telephoning your call centre, I was told that an engineer had in fact called at the address and had also 'tried to telephone'. Bearing in mind that our tenant was by her telephone, that the line was free at the time he claimed to have called (at 5.30) and no missed calls were logged on her telephone, this would appear to be a fictitious claim.

I spoke to Ian, one of your Customer Support Managers, and relayed my fury that not only had an engineer failed to call, but had provided misleading (ie false) information to his base and left our tenants without hot water or heating for another cold night.

I was assured by him that an engineer will call between 1000 and 1200 tomorrow, so I'll keep you posted on progress in that regard.

However, when I asked what kind of compensation I could offer to our tenants, I was told that because BG is unregulated, it is not required or obliged to offer any compensation. A goodwill gesture of £10 was offered by him (and accepted, rather grudgingly, by me, on behalf of our tenants) - pitifully mean, really, as an apology for denying someone warmth and personal hygiene (they can't shower or bath, obviously) for a day and a night.

What are your thoughts on this matter, Mr Weston? I note your response to similar instances of poor service last March:-

Chris Weston, managing director of British Gas Services says: "I'm confident that we deliver among the highest levels of service in the industry. But there is always room for improvement and I know that our customers have come to accept nothing but the best from a trusted brand like British Gas.

"We've had a tough winter, the coldest in nine years and the highest number of breakdowns on record. Clearly for some customers things have gone wrong, and I apologise for that, as I understand the frustration that a service failure causes. Our call centre staff and engineers worked around the clock - and continue to do so, to try to ensure that we can meet the high expectations of our customers." Guardian, March 11, 2006

In the event that an engineer doesn't show up at tomorrow's appointed time, are our tenants to be slipped another tenner by way of an apology? Is this the best British Gas can do? Is my mother's £1200+ well-spent, do you think, on a service which offers no guarantee of its call centres assurances having any degree of reliability?

An article in PRNewswire reports:-

... responsibilities for energy and home services have been split, allowing Mark Clare and his team to concentrate on the challenges for the energy business posed by the commodity price environment, to progress the cost reduction initiatives and to complete the implementation of the transformation programme. Chris Weston will now lead the British Gas Home Services team to continue to exploit this growth opportunity to the full.

Is BG's unregulated status also being exploited as a means of denying its customers appropriate redress when its services fail its customers? What do you think?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Simon Saunders

cc consumer@guardian.co.uk, m.brignall@guardian.co.uk