From: United Utilities, Customer Relations Department

Sent: 31 December 2010

To: eribsskog@gmail.com

Subject: Your Response from United Utilities: Compensation request

Dear Mr Ribsskog

Thank you for your e-mail of 25 December 2010, a copy of which we also received on 30 December 2010 from the Consumer Council for Water Northern, to reply to you directly in this instance. I will ensure a copy of our reply is sent to them for their files. I am sorry that we have been unable to resolve your complaint satisfactorily and that you have had to contact us again. I have completed a review of your complaint, again in line with Stage 2 of our complaints procedure. The outcome of this review is set out below.

I can see from our records that you had a Direct Debit payment plan set up with us previously for £25.00 per month; regrettably, we had to cancel this as your Direct Debit payments defaulted. As you broke the terms of your payment arrangement, we passed your account to a collection agency, Redcastle Debt Recovery. I note that they were happy to accept £25.00 per month from you and that you did maintain the payment plan with them.

As you had made regular payments to the agency, without incident, they passed your account back to us to see if we could offer you any assistance with the repayment plan. This is the reason we have sent income and expenditure forms out to you and also why Mr Simpson from our Payments Assistance Team has written to you. Our intention was to obtain an overview of your financial circumstances to ascertain why your charges had become overdue for payment and to try and identify what help, if any, we could give provide.

As soon as Redcastle passed your account back to us our own recovery department, Concilia, began monitoring your account. I am sorry for the difficulties you have encountered trying to set up a Direct Debit with our recovery department, the reasons for this are because of your previous history with these payments and also because £25.00 per month is not sufficient to clear your outstanding balance of £1,197.80 before your new charges are applied, on or before 1 April 2011.

We have advised you that to change your current payment plan, including the method of payment, you would have to speak to our Payments Assistance Team (PAT) on 0845 746 2034. After they have reviewed your income and expenditure they will decide if £25.00 by Direct Debit is suitable. Depending on your circumstances we may be able to help you clear your arrears and PAT can advise you of all of the available schemes when you contact them.

Meanwhile, to allow you time to contact PAT I have reset your monthly payment plan at £25.00 per month with effect from 25 January 2010. A payment schedule will be sent to you within the next 10 days confirming these details. Please note that in the event of no contact from you your payment plan will reassess automatically over 12 months after your new charges are applied.

Please disregard any reminders that may have crossed with my reply. We will still monitor your account for payment; however, I can assure you that at the moment we do not intend to take any further recovery action.

Turning now to the additional comments you have raised:

I accept that you may have found our debt department impolite; however, I would like to explain that as their role is to recover outstanding debt, our staff in this department need to be able to handle what can sometimes be difficult conversations, firmly but fairly. They receive training on how to handle calls with a view to recovering the debt balances which have accrued. The action they have taken and the advice they have provided are in line with our normal processes and procedures.

I hope you will appreciate the difficult task we face, with over 3 million customers, when payments become overdue – particularly as debt is one of the major problems currently facing the water industry.

It has not been our intention to offend you by the action we have taken and I would also like to point out that we do not discriminate against any of our customers, irrespective of where they have been born, or for any other reason. We will always aim to treat all of our customers equally.

I cannot accede to your request to offer you ‘free water for life’ as this is not a service we would ever offer, instead any errors and instances of poor service are address through our Guaranteed Standards of Service Scheme. While I can see £25.00 has been awarded previously because of an error made with your

Direct Debit, after reviewing your complaint I do not believe there are any grounds to offer additional credits or compensation.

I accept that this may not be the outcome you will have hoped for and that you hold strong views about this matter. However, I trust I have explained our position clearly for you.

If you would like any information about this reply, please contact us on 0845 309 3003 and select option 2. However, we would recommend that you call the Payments Assistance Team to discuss your account, as they will be happy to discuss payment options with you. Our office is open Monday to Friday from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. Alternatively, if you would prefer to contact us by email please use the ‘Contact Us’ facility on the United Utilities website, as the email address this reply is sent from does not accept incoming emails.

I trust the information provided will be of assistance to you. For a copy of our complaints procedure, please click on this link http://www.unitedutilities.com/Documents/Our_complaints_procedure.pdf.

Yours sincerely

Mrs Dawn Ellis

Case Manager

Customer Relations Department

Website: www.unitedutilities.com

cc: Consumer Council for Water, Northern

When you supplied your email address and emailed us you acknowledged and agreed that we may treat specific actions by you, such as sending us an email, or supplying us with an email address for customer service to respond to you, as a request that we may, where necessary, communicate in our response personal and/or account information by unencrypted email. We take reasonable precautions to protect your information, however you should understand that "perfect security" does not exist on the internet or on email networks and that use of these mediums involves some level of risk to you.

If you would prefer to contact us using a more secure method, please do so by:

Calling: 0845 309 3003

Writing to:

United Utilities,

PO Box 453,

Warrington

WA55 1SE

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