QDR Solicitors letter receieved for non payment of fuel

matt_drummer

As I said, the only people in the wrong here are Sainsbury's.

It should never have been passed to the solicitors.

Sainsbury's should just take the money when it is offered to them and call off their debt collectors.

Aretnap

paul_c123 said:

There is no requirement for a customer to offer payment twice.

Take an analogy, you go into a shop and buy something, you pay in cash and leave the cash on the counter. The till operator fumbles the cash (let's say its a £10 note) and it flutters away in the wind, it lands in some quick setting concrete outside and is quickly covered by more wet concrete, rendering it unreachable by the shop.

Sigh. There is no requirement for the customer to offer payment at all. The requirement is that they make payment. Clearly the OP hasn't done that, and Sainsbury's can still claim at least the original £52 until he does, or until they explicitly say that he doesn't have to pay. 

Your analogy is nothing like the OP's situation as it involves actual cash. If his cash blows out of his hand while he's on his way into the kiosk then he hasn't made payment and he still has to pay for his fuel. If he hands it over to the assistant then he has made his payment, and if the assistant subsequently loses it that's Sainsbury's problem, not his problem. The scenario of leaving the money on the till in the hope that the assistant will pick it up and then it blowing away is a grey area where it's debatable whether he has actually made his payment or not. However it's completely different from a failed credit card transaction where clearly no money has left the OP's account, let alone been received by Sainsbury's, so it's clear that payment hasn't been made.

paul_c123

Aretnap said:

paul_c123 said:

There is no requirement for a customer to offer payment twice.

Take an analogy, you go into a shop and buy something, you pay in cash and leave the cash on the counter. The till operator fumbles the cash (let's say its a £10 note) and it flutters away in the wind, it lands in some quick setting concrete outside and is quickly covered by more wet concrete, rendering it unreachable by the shop.

Sigh. There is no requirement for the customer to offer payment at all. The requirement is that they make payment. Clearly the OP hasn't done that, and Sainsbury's can still claim at least the original £52 until he does, or until they explicitly say that he doesn't have to pay. 

Your analogy is nothing like the OP's situation as it involves actual cash. If his cash blows out of his hand while he's on his way into the kiosk then he hasn't made payment and he still has to pay for his fuel. If he hands it over to the assistant then he has made his payment, and if the assistant subsequently loses it that's Sainsbury's problem, not his problem. The scenario of leaving the money on the till in the hope that the assistant will pick it up and then it blowing away is a grey area where it's debatable whether he has actually made his payment or not. However it's completely different from a failed credit card transaction where clearly no money has left the OP's account, let alone been received by Sainsbury's, so it's clear that payment hasn't been made.

This scenario is what's happened as above. He made payment - there is/was a pre-auth. Sainsbury's have subsequently "lost" it. The only difference in the cash example being, that the customer got it back, because it was an electronic record that was reconciled as zero-sum, where a physical instrument such as cash would have genuinely been 'lost'.

Its not a failed credit card transaction, it seems to have followed all the rules set by the banking regulations surrounding credit card payments. Its Sainsbury's failing to present the settlement payment following a pre-auth which is their system, not the credit card system.

TooManyPoints

Clearly the OP hasn't done that, and Sainsbury's can still claim at least** the original £52...

Yes. From the driver.

**Are you suggesting they might claim more than the cost of the fuel in these circumstances? In my view they should offer him some compensation for setting debt collectors on to him  when absolutely none of this was of his making.

Aretnap

TooManyPoints said:

Clearly the OP hasn't done that, and Sainsbury's can still claim at least** the original £52...

Yes. From the driver.

**Are you suggesting they might claim more than the cost of the fuel in these circumstances? In my view they should offer him some compensation for setting debt collectors on to him  when absolutely none of this was of his making.

As I've said already it shouldn't exactly be difficult to prove who the driver was, on the balance if probabilities at least, given that they used their credit card. So I don't think there is much to be gained by prevaricating about the driver's identity. I've assumed it's the OP mainly to avoid having to use convoluted language; if it was someone else then he's welcome to correct me if he wants to. 

*Well, clearly they are trying to claim more than the original cost of fuel. But no I don't think they can succeed, so long as the OP** is reasonable and makes an offer to pay what's owed once the error is pointed out to him etc, which is what he is doing. If he behaved unreasonably, refused to pay anything at all, ignored all correspondence completely etc then they could potentially claim additional costs, even though the original error was of their own making. Which is why I would suggest that he puts an offer to pay the original amount in writing at this point rather than ignoring them outright.

**Or the driver, if you prefer.