Invoice issue

Craftythorny

Hi, I wonder if anyone could clear up a query for me, and I'll try and keep a long story short; I work for a mental health charity and until recently our waste bin collections were dealt with by the county council who own the building where we are based. 18 months ago, or thereabouts, and without telling us, they outsourced this to a private company who happen to be a big international one. This was done sometime in autumn of 2017. We then received a bill from this company in June of this year saying that we owe 18 months worth of invoices - they added that they were sorry for taking this long to get around to invoicing us. My Service Manager contact the county council and eventually learned that the outsourcing was done without anyone telling us. We are liaising with both the company and the council to sort out the issue but the company have now given us a 7 day notice period to end our waste collections. They also sent us a load of invoices but only going back to March 2018. I have since asked for the previous ones to this and have been told that they will send them shortly.


My main queries are these - on the invoices there is a charge per unit for a bin collection, and it separates out the general waste and recycling. Under a number of these is a statement 'excess weight charge' and then there is a charge per Kilogramme. I asked for more clarity about this and was told 'your excess weight charge is a little misleading as this is not excess weight it is just weight' and that the council asked to be billed by weight. The unit price for weight is £0.1236 per kilogramme for regular waste and £.0618 per kilogramme for recycling. If the maths is done properly, and I did spot a couple of typo's where we were charged £12.36 per kg and £6.18 per Kg which I will highlight to them, but the actual charge works out mostly at fractions of a penny - they then raise this up always to the next full penny or pound. Is this allowed???? And also is there anything we can do to contest this whole situation?


Any advice or information is very much appreciated.

Aquamania

Craftythorny wrote: »

Hi, I wonder if anyone could clear up a query for me, and I'll try and keep a long story short; I work for a mental health charity and until recently our waste bin collections were dealt with by the county council who own the building where we are based. 18 months ago, or thereabouts, and without telling us, they outsourced this to a private company who happen to be a big international one. This was done sometime in autumn of 2017. We then received a bill from this company in June of this year saying that we owe 18 months worth of invoices - they added that they were sorry for taking this long to get around to invoicing us. My Service Manager contact the county council and eventually learned that the outsourcing was done without anyone telling us. We are liaising with both the company and the council to sort out the issue but the company have now given us a 7 day notice period to end our waste collections. They also sent us a load of invoices but only going back to March 2018. I have since asked for the previous ones to this and have been told that they will send them shortly.


My main queries are these - on the invoices there is a charge per unit for a bin collection, and it separates out the general waste and recycling. Under a number of these is a statement 'excess weight charge' and then there is a charge per Kilogramme. I asked for more clarity about this and was told 'your excess weight charge is a little misleading as this is not excess weight it is just weight' and that the council asked to be billed by weight. The unit price for weight is £0.1236 per kilogramme for regular waste and £.0618 per kilogramme for recycling. If the maths is done properly, and I did spot a couple of typo's where we were charged £12.36 per kg and £6.18 per Kg which I will highlight to them, but the actual charge works out mostly at fractions of a penny - they then raise this up always to the next full penny or pound. Is this allowed???? And also is there anything we can do to contest this whole situation?


Any advice or information is very much appreciated.

No one can legally enter you into a contract with a third party without your authority. Think of the chaos that would ensure if that were permitted.

So a couple of examples of what may have happened.

1. You entered into a contract with the council, and that contract included a possibility for the service provider (the council) to appoint another to provide that service. Although you would normally expect the terms/prices to remain the same.

2. If the council decided to stop offering the service that you were using (in line with any contractual agreement that may have existed), and you started using this third party, you may be liable under some kind of deemed contract if you did not agree a specific agreement with them.

You need to check out what really happened, because it didn't happen the way you have put it across, sorry.

In regards to rounding up/down of a bill, sure that will occur. They can't charge in less than 1p increments, and you can't attempt to reclaim a fraction of a penny.

Mistral001

The mistakes in the bill seem to substantial. Charging £6.18 instead of 6.18p per kg is overcharging by nearly 10,000%. This is obviously an error. Are you seriously saying that the waste company is disputing that there is an error?

If you paid for your waste collection before this company took over, you will not get 18 months free bin collection because nobody told you that there was a change in firms collecting the bins. However, if you find it difficult to pay what you owe because the bill came in one 18 month chunk, then ask that you pay what you owe in instalments added to future bills.

tacpot12

They should raise calculated figures to the nearest penny. Raising it to the nearest pound is unreasonable.

Savvy_Sue

and you can of course now shop around and find another company to provide this service. However, they'll all want contracts of at least a year, with a clause where you have to give at least three months notice or it will roll over for another year at whatever the going rate is.

If you want to give yourself more time, it would be worth paying SOMETHING towards these bills, while making it clear that is is a part-payment while the bill remains in dispute.

Craftythorny

Hi, thank you all so much for your input, some very useful information for us.


Just to clarify a couple of things - we were not paying for the bins before all this - the council were paying. We were just hit with a big invoice for over 18 months worth of bin collections. At first I thought it was an error on their part and referred them to the council but it quickly became apparent that were the ones now due to pay the bill - no-one at the council informed us. Although they authorised the contract in our name does not the waste company themselves have any responsibility to verify things when they see that the people being billed are an entirely different organisation to the one issuing the contract?

Manxman_in_exile

If your charity is based in a council property, what is the nature of your agreement with them, and is your charity the sole occupier of this particular building? ie do you pay rent, what does the rent cover eg waste collection.


I'm not sure that you can have entered into any kind of contract with a commercial waste collection service without your knowledge. What evidence of a contract can they produce? They may argue that you've permitted them to collect waste and have therefore entered a contract "by conduct", but if the council had not made you aware of the change in arrangements then you would not intentionally have entered into a contract with the new provider.


Depending on the nature of your relationship with the council I'd be complaining to them that their failure to inform you of the change in arrangements has directly resulted in you receiving these back charges.


Also depending on the amount I'd be looking for legal advice.

Aquamania

Craftythorny wrote: »

Hi, thank you all so much for your input, some very useful information for us.


Just to clarify a couple of things - we were not paying for the bins before all this - the council were paying. We were just hit with a big invoice for over 18 months worth of bin collections. At first I thought it was an error on their part and referred them to the council but it quickly became apparent that were the ones now due to pay the bill - no-one at the council informed us. Although they authorised the contract in our name does not the waste company themselves have any responsibility to verify things when they see that the people being billed are an entirely different organisation to the one issuing the contract?

So you are suggesting that this commercial waste collection service provided by a "private company who happen to be a big international one" are happily emptying the council's bins?

I don't think so. Every large waste collection service I know of, like Biffa, provide their own bins and only empty their own bins.

I refer you to the reply I gave previously about who can form contracts, and how you may be in a deemed contract if you use a service without a prior contract in place.

Craftythorny

Thanks again for all your replies. I have asked our head office myself for information in our tenancy agreement about waste collection and it does not seem to be in there, and we are the sole occupiers and have been for about 14 years. I have only been here myself since January last year. It turns out that the bins are marked with the company name, which I realised when I went to check when this whole thing came to light. I'm not sure about a 'deemed contract' - I don't tend to pay attention to waste bins and what is marked on them. They are emptied every fortnight in the early hours of the morning so we don't get to see who empties them but it is the waste company. At the moment our Service Manager is still liaising with the council and trying to find out exactly who authorised this - whenever she makes contact it seems certain people are off or not available or so and so has the information and have passed it on to someone else to deal with - so progress is slow. In the meantime the company are wanting their money, and then some!! - they have also billed us for washroom sanitary bin collections. This I know is done by an entirely different company who bill us annually for their service and have done so for the past 6 years. We mentioned this to the waste company who then said that they sub-contract to this other company for that particular service. We are refusing to pay those invoices as it means we are then paying twice for the same service. You'd think that a big global corporation would have a bit more of a handle on its invoicing system.


To add to this they still work out cheaper than going back to the local borough council waste collection as they do charge by weight - it seems when the council started with them they asked to be billed by weight so at least that keeps it cheap - we only produce on average one 5litre bag of waste per day, with nothing more than few tissues and sandwich wrappers. All other collection companies charge per bin size and frequency of collection.


On another note - does anyone know if it is actually legal to charge for anything in fractions of a penny? or to set a unit rate that ends up working out at fractions of a penny?

comeandgo

Craftythorny wrote: »

Thanks again for all your replies. I have asked our head office myself for information in our tenancy agreement about waste collection and it does not seem to be in there, and we are the sole occupiers and have been for about 14 years. I have only been here myself since January last year. It turns out that the bins are marked with the company name, which I realised when I went to check when this whole thing came to light. I'm not sure about a 'deemed contract' - I don't tend to pay attention to waste bins and what is marked on them. They are emptied every fortnight in the early hours of the morning so we don't get to see who empties them but it is the waste company. At the moment our Service Manager is still liaising with the council and trying to find out exactly who authorised this - whenever she makes contact it seems certain people are off or not available or so and so has the information and have passed it on to someone else to deal with - so progress is slow. In the meantime the company are wanting their money, and then some!! - they have also billed us for washroom sanitary bin collections. This I know is done by an entirely different company who bill us annually for their service and have done so for the past 6 years.


On another note - does anyone know if it is actually legal to charge for anything in fractions of a penny? or to set a unit rate that ends up working out at fractions of a penny?

Are you sure it's not the original sanitary bin collection company who made the mistake in charging you?
My diesel is charged as fractions of a penny. Usually ending in 9/10ths. Ie 1.299 a litre.

spadoosh

Craftythorny wrote: »

Thanks again for all your replies. I have asked our head office myself for information in our tenancy agreement about waste collection and it does not seem to be in there, and we are the sole occupiers and have been for about 14 years. I have only been here myself since January last year. It turns out that the bins are marked with the company name, which I realised when I went to check when this whole thing came to light. I'm not sure about a 'deemed contract' - I don't tend to pay attention to waste bins and what is marked on them. They are emptied every fortnight in the early hours of the morning so we don't get to see who empties them but it is the waste company. At the moment our Service Manager is still liaising with the council and trying to find out exactly who authorised this - whenever she makes contact it seems certain people are off or not available or so and so has the information and have passed it on to someone else to deal with - so progress is slow. In the meantime the company are wanting their money, and then some!! - they have also billed us for washroom sanitary bin collections. This I know is done by an entirely different company who bill us annually for their service and have done so for the past 6 years. We mentioned this to the waste company who then said that they sub-contract to this other company for that particular service. We are refusing to pay those invoices as it means we are then paying twice for the same service. You'd think that a big global corporation would have a bit more of a handle on its invoicing system.


To add to this they still work out cheaper than going back to the local borough council waste collection as they do charge by weight - it seems when the council started with them they asked to be billed by weight so at least that keeps it cheap - we only produce on average one 5litre bag of waste per day, with nothing more than few tissues and sandwich wrappers. All other collection companies charge per bin size and frequency of collection.


On another note - does anyone know if it is actually legal to charge for anything in fractions of a penny? or to set a unit rate that ends up working out at fractions of a penny?

Cant help anywhere else but i can help here. Its perfectly legal to charge in fractions of a penny and perfectly legal to round up. Most people do it every day when they pay for petrol (129.9p per litre, 5 litres is 649.5p which would be rounded up to 650p.)