Against whom do I issue my claim in small claims court?

Sandtree

Realistically does the independent expert need to come out again? I would have thought his site visit notes were sufficient to be able to state either categorically that its beyond economic repair or to give a ball park repair cost. It is something thats surprising that its not in the report already, certainly our loss adjusters would as standard comment on cost of repair even if its exceeded a policy limit or for some other reason the claim will be repudiated.

Have you received a final response letter from Lloyds prior to going to the FOS? If not all FOS do is send a basic email that has a load of blurb on importants of complaints handling etc and in the middle of all the standard text they put one or two sentences that summarises your complaint... having seen many of these in the past the summary can at times be exceptionally poor to out and out wrong. There is no feedback loop after the email is sent (or certainly wasnt in my day)

If you do have Lloyds final response then it will go through their processes but they can be slow at the best of times let alone right now with Covid... my most recent escalation to them was only a couple of months so not too bad but my previous one was over 2 years and in the end FOS paid out of their own pocket because of the delays.

waamo

Another point to take in to consideration is that a court hearing will be at least 12 months away. The wheels of justice turn very slowly and there is a massive backlog in the courts at the moment.

This may have a bearing on what route you wish to take.

Manxman_in_exile

...

It is beyond all doubt that Sofology Limited (and therefore Lloyds Banking which is jointly liable) is in clear breach of its written warranty relating to the suspension and padding because neither the suspension nor the padding lasted for even half of the warranty period.

...

No.  Don't confuse any joint liability Lloyds may have under s.75 with the Sofology warranty.  Any s75 liability is in respect of your statutory consumer rights.  Any warranty is entirely separate and only Sofology, not Lloyds*, is liable under it.  So if you want to claim against Lloyds, forget the warranty.

*At least it's my understanding that the credit provider doesn't have any s75 liability for manufacturer warranties but I may be wrong(?).

DoaM

S75 makes the credit provider jointly liable with the seller for the performance of the contract. If the contract includes a warranty then S75 would cover that too.

Sandtree

Manxman_in_exile said:

*At least it's my understanding that the credit provider doesn't have any s75 liability for manufacturer warranties but I may be wrong(?).

Ordinarily the answer would be... its complicated.

As DoaM says, the liability is for performance of contract and that contract is between the customer and the merchant. In this case the merchant is the manufacturer and so performance of the manufacturers warranty is clear cut and in scope. 

Had it been John Lewis selling a third party sofa then life gets more complex as they have statutory requirements around the sofa but those are different to the warranty but the warranty must exist if advertised otherwise that is a retailer issue but a general poor performance of a warranty could be argued not to be a retailer issue if they are separate legal entities.

DoaM

And just to complicate things further - it depends on who is responsible for servicing the warranty .. it's not always the manufacturer.  

Manxman_in_exile

Thank you both for the correction.  It did suddenly strike me as I was typing it that I might be wrong!