I organised a trip to Venice for members of our running club in October last year. Twenty-one of the group were flying back with BA to Gatwick on October 23, but the flight was delayed more than three hours, thus entitling them to statutory compensation of £220 each.
Bizarrely, while 19 of the group have received their payment, two have repeatedly been told they are not entitled to it. Can you help resolve this?
M.G., Olney, Bucks.
A reader was confused when 19 of their group received £220 for the delay but two of the didn’t
Sally Hamilton replies: What should have been a quick and simple claim for compensation turned a sprint into a marathon for two of your club members.
You described your wonderful four-night visit to the city which involved some members taking part in a 10k run and others a half marathon, with all of them doing plenty of sightseeing and shopping in between.
Despite the successful trip, the pair overlooked for compensation felt a bit miffed by BA’s high-handed approach. I totally understand. It made no sense that BA handed over £220 each to 19 of your group but rejected the claims of the remaining two.
European Union rules say flights of less than 1,500 km coming into the UK from a European country that are delayed for three hours or more mean passengers are entitled to compensation of £220 each.
Airlines can escape paying if a delay is because of ‘extraordinary circumstances’, such as bad weather, industrial action, or traffic control restrictions.
In its response to your fellow runners’ appeal, BA said that on the day of the group’s return from Venice the flight was delayed due to Greek military exercises causing air traffic control restrictions over the continent — something out of its control. This had affected the arrival time of incoming flights and the knock-on effect of delaying your group.
If this was the case, then why did 19 of your co-travellers receive compensation, I asked BA, pointing out the obvious contradiction.
After a few days investigating, the airline came back and repeated the explanation that the payment was not due to the two women because of the Greek military manoeuvres.
Its justification was that the information about the air traffic control delay had not been loaded onto the BA computer system by the time the main cohort of your group had applied for their compensation, allowing their claims to get across the line.
It would seem the remaining members had been slower off the mark with their applications, by which time the information had been updated and caused the computer to say ‘no’.
After some persuasion by me about the unfairness of this scenario, BA agreed that as a goodwill gesture it would pay the money to the excluded members — a total of £440 — on receipt of their booking details. Quite right.
Water firm says my wife’s cafe owes it £2,700
My wife runs a small cafe in South London. It has two water suppliers — on the ground floor it’s Clear Business and on the first floor, Castle Water, which took over business water supplies from Thames Water in 2017.
The bill for downstairs, which is largely for coffee making and washing up, is about £700 a year, paid by direct debit.
Upstairs was, until 2018, only a toilet that cost £70 a year. When a water heater, sink and kitchen were added to improve the food offering in the cafe the bill rose to £280 a year, paid by direct debit at £24 a month. The last time Castle Water took a meter reading was spring 2019.
A bill dated May 22, last year, shows consumption and payments were aligned, with a small credit surplus. It also said Castle would continue to take £23.92 by direct debit every month. But further down this bill appeared a scary sum suggesting she owed almost £2,700 in water supply, sewage services and standing charges, plus VAT and, on August, 30, without any warning, Castle took £700. Please Help.
R.W., London
Sally Hamilton replies: You told me your wife panicked when she saw the £700 drain out of her account and immediately recalled the direct debit. Had she not done so she would have had no money to pay staff wages.
She was confused by the size of the sum, and read the water meter that day, and again about three weeks later, with the figures taken suggesting the cafe’s water usage was around £1 a day.
She felt, that even if the water consumption had been underestimated over the previous four years, that the accumulated debt would be half what Castle Water was claiming.
During Covid, the cafe did not even operate for three months, so there was no consumption at all .
A few weeks after your wife recalled the direct debit, Castle Water informed her the issue had been passed to the disconnection team, with the ‘debt’ handed over to collection company Marston.
This was despite you and your wife contacting Castle Water with your defence that the consumption could not be as high as it had calculated. The company refused to accept it had failed to carry out regular readings or send alerts that this debt was accruing.
When you and your wife challenged the bill, suggesting inaccuracies with the sums, it stood firm and insisted you must pay half the balance owed immediately and spread the cost of the other half over a few months.
Since you seemed to be swimming against the tide with Castle Water’s customer service and told me you were in no position to pay almost £1,350 at the drop of a hat, I stepped in to ask the firm to check whether something had gone seriously wrong.
Castle Water agreed to investigate immediately and just a few days later it came back and admitted there had been an issue with an historic meter reading made by its predecessor, Thames Water, in 2019, that had not made its way into your bill calculations.
The firm agreed to cancel the original £2,700 bill, call off the debt collectors and issue an updated calculation of costs, which it said would be ‘significantly lower’.
The company said it had made attempts to read your meter in the past, but admitted it struggled to find the device and had asked Thames Water to go the cafe premises to locate it and update Castle Water with the location information.
This it eventually did.
The firm says it generally aims to arrange twice a year in-person meter checks but said that since it is inside the property it ‘encourages’ you and your wife to provide your own readings. Castle Water finally produced a more realistic and manageable total of £1,000, which you have mutually agreed to pay off, at the rate of £180 a month by standing order.
