BT - This kind of trickery makes me really MAD!!

wantmemoney

littleboo wrote:

Unfortunately your friend is wrong with his blanket statement. Verbal agreements can be enforceable.

Ypaymore wrote:

Under law there are two basic terms that constitute a binding agreement. The verbal agreement will be binding if....

In the UK all law(consumer/criminal) is written and freely accessible to the public. Please link to where this is written so we all can share.

1carminestocky

(Disclaimer - I'm no lawyer, far from it!) Surely a verbal contract must be backed up a recording of it being explained and accepted? If not, then the law really IS an a.ss.

I'm reminded of Sam Goldwyn's famous faux pas here - 'A verbal contract aint worth the paper it's written on'.

Antagony

Today is the first time I've been able to talk to my friend again and he still stands by what he said. The thing to note is that consumer protection laws apply and they are not the same as the laws covering business contracts.

For obvious reasons I can't name the company he worked for--suffice it to say that they are a national household heating fuel supplier--but he worked on debt collection and their policy, what he was trained to do, was to push customers as hard as possible to pay disputed contract--even up to the point of threatening to sue them--but to write them off if they were prepared to hold out beyond that. Apparently there was no point trying to sue them because they'd never won a case.

Where BT fell down for me--and by the way, they've now capitulated on this matter--is that they failed to provide me with adequate [any] notification about the contract and what my cancellation rights were. That failure meant that I had never, technically, started my cooling off period.