British Gas Homecare cancel service and refund £65.

TELLIT01

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask the question, but as above, I've had an e-mail from British Gas basically saying they don't have enough engineers and are cancelling this year's annual service.  They will refund £65 to cover the cost of the service.  As my contract with BG covers parts and labour in the event of anything needing repair or replacement, will I be able to claim these costs back from BG?

I will try to get an answer from BG, but I won't hold my breath.

Any thoughts on the legal position would be appreciated.

Brie

Have they cancelled the whole contract for the year or just a portion?

Aylesbury_Duck

What costs have you incurred?  If something goes wrong, you presumably still have a contract for callouts, which includes parts and labour.

MACKEM99

TELLIT01 said:

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask the question, but as above, I've had an e-mail from British Gas basically saying they don't have enough engineers and are cancelling this year's annual service.  They will refund £65 to cover the cost of the service.  As my contract with BG covers parts and labour in the event of anything needing repair or replacement, will I be able to claim these costs back from BG?

I will try to get an answer from BG, but I won't hold my breath.

Any thoughts on the legal position would be appreciated.

Do you have a guarantee which requires an annual service?

TELLIT01

They've cancelled the service but I don't have a guarantee which requires one.  My question to them was what happens if a need for parts is discovered during annual service.  The response was that BG would reimburse any costs incurred.  If there was a 'normal' breakdown I would contact BG first and see how long it would take them to get an engineer to me.

The bigger problem will be for people who do require annual service to maintain a warranty.

Aylesbury_Duck

TELLIT01 said:

They've cancelled the service but I don't have a guarantee which requires one.  My question to them was what happens if a need for parts is discovered during annual service.  The response was that BG would reimburse any costs incurred.  If there was a 'normal' breakdown I would contact BG first and see how long it would take them to get an engineer to me.

The bigger problem will be for people who do require annual service to maintain a warranty.

The expectation is that you'll spend the £65 getting it serviced elsewhere, and if parts are needed (because they're likely to fail soon), you pay for them.  The service contract is for breakdowns and keeping the system running.  It's not there to pay your preventative maintenance costs.

Brie

There's two problems here that I can see.

The first is trying to find anyone to do an annual service for £65.  I think ours has normally been about £85.

Second is that if something is discovered to be wrong on the service then the gas will be shut off (legal requirement I've been told).  That is unless the peep doing the service has the exact bit required to resolve the issue in the truck which of course may be possible but I would have thought more likely with BG.  

And actually a third problem - having to pay upfront for any parts and then waiting for BG to refund , after they remember that they've promised to do so.

Aylesbury_Duck

Brie said:

There's two problems here that I can see.

The first is trying to find anyone to do an annual service for £65.  I think ours has normally been about £85.

Second is that if something is discovered to be wrong on the service then the gas will be shut off (legal requirement I've been told).  That is unless the peep doing the service has the exact bit required to resolve the issue in the truck which of course may be possible but I would have thought more likely with BG.  

And actually a third problem - having to pay upfront for any parts and then waiting for BG to refund , after they remember that they've promised to do so.

Yes, mine is normally £75-85 but in all honesty, I get a proper service for that, not the nonsense from BG that masquerades as a service.  I abandoned service contracts with an annual service a few years ago after a decent gas technician did a service for me, took much longer, had everything apart and was pretty scathing about the job the BG people had done over the years.  Just basic things like cleaning were neglected.  The annual services from the Big Six seem akin to servicing your car by sticking a probe up the exhaust and checking it's within a pretty broad tolerance.  The extra £20 or so is worth it for a proper job.

Yes, if there's a dangerous fault the gas will be shut off, but again, the BG technicians are on the clock - they are less likely to carry all the necessary spares or have the inclination to effect a fix than a decent independent gas technician.

On your last point, I don't think BG have promised to refund parts that are replaced as part of the annual service.  I suspect that the callout service covers the cost of parts and labour once there's a problem.  It's not there to replace parts pre-emptively, that's the OP's responsibility, so if an independent service technician recommends replacing a part that is starting to wear, for example, it's up to OP to pay for that.  If the boiler fails as a result of that worn part, BG pay for it as part of the callout contract.  Now people could decide to be cheap, and wait until things fail until getting them fixed on the contract, but then they face the risk that it will take time for a callout, or that the failure causes other problems for which they might be liable.  It's a bit like those people that never check their car over, assuming that the annual MOT test will address any problems.  It might, but it also might lead to an expensive failure and massive inconvenience.

Brie

I must admit I was really disappointed to find that BG had set up 3 service contracts for my elderly inlaws in the few years before my FiL died.  There were huge overlaps as well so I obviously called them up to have a massive crank at them for their blatantly taking advantage of vulnerable individuals. 

FiL was a BG man loyally, wouldn't buy shares when they were first offered and would never contemplate leaving them for any other company.  It was a disgrace that he could be sold so many contracts by one company who should have been able to tell simply by the length of time he'd been with them that he was elderly.  Not helped by the fact that he was increasingly deaf and visually impaired in the last 2 years so couldn't even check the bills or bank statements.  

Fortunately they had the good grace to admit their error and refunded a number of years for the contracts in full despite having serviced and repaired things a number of times over that time.  I suspect that the more competitive market as well as the awareness of consumer rights particularly for the vulnerable helped with the positive resolution.   Plus I'm very good at complaining! 

bris

BG pay sub contractors (they use a couple of big agencies) £20 per service and require them to do 10-12 a day. For that all they expect is a safety check not what I would call an actual service. They also have their own employees but they, I believe are salaried..

This requires a visual inspection basically the front cover off, a quick look to see if anything is obvious then an analyser check on the flue and off they go. I have also been told a lot of them don't even do a tightness test, to me it's the first thing you do before undertaking any gas work on a property as soon as you enter that property to so anything on a gas appliance you are responsible for it.

I went to an interview with them about 6 of 7 years ago to see what was involved, the area they wanted me to cover was an old town where I was told there was about 3 or 4 back boilers a day I would need to do, my exact words to him was "you kidding, you expect me to do 3 or 4 back boilers out of 10-12 jobs a day and thats where I ended the interview. Don't get me some back boilers are bullet proof but there is no quick way to service one.

Another thing they ask you to do with people with older boilers is try to get you to convince them to allow a salesman out to see them.

TELLIT01

When our boiler service was done last year, the engineer was here for just under an hour so ther is no way he would be doing 10-12 per day.  He was in a BG van but that may not prove anything.  He certainly did more than a basic safety check.