My mother is 94 and a widow. For 40 years she received an income of £300 a month from four investment bonds held by ReAssure.
In 2020, those payments suddenly stopped without any notice or explanation. It took her a while to find the energy to do anything about it and last year she asked her lawyers to investigate. They have worked tirelessly to try to resolve this, but have got nowhere.
Mum just wants ReAssure to pay her the missing payments and restart her regular income. This uncertainty has been enormously stressful for her. It’s quite frightening not knowing whether you’re going to have enough money to pay for care costs and living expenses. She fears she won’t see a resolution to this in her lifetime.
Name and address supplied
Katherine Denham writes
This ordeal had been going on for so long that your mother missed about £18,000 in payments. I spoke to ReAssure’s parent company, Phoenix, and chased the company for weeks before it finally gave me an explanation. It said the payments for her policies were incorrectly stopped after your mother returned one of its letters in 2020. That letter was an annual statement about one of her policies, but she had been confused about this and had written, “No thanks, what policy?” and sent the letter back to ReAssure.
When I spoke to your mother she said she thought the information in this letter was unclear and had been full of figures that she didn’t understand. ReAssure misinterpreted this returned letter to mean that she was no longer living at that address.
When letters are returned, it’s standard procedure for financial companies to remove the address from their records to prevent confidential information going to the wrong place. Companies will often place restrictions on an account or stop payments until they know that they have the right address, which is designed to protect customers. Yet your mother had lived at the same place for the past 50 years and had clearly not returned the letter because she had moved.
In 2021 ReAssure had confirmed that your mother was still living at the same address, at which point her payments should have been reinstated. But this did not happen, which it blamed on an administrative error.
The efforts from you and her solicitor to try to resolve this went nowhere. ReAssure said it had no record of your chasing this up, but said it had been speaking to your solicitor since last year. At this point ReAssure had not realised that your mother’s address had been removed due to human error and so did not know that the payments had been stopped. Every time the company had a chance to redeem itself, it managed to dig itself into an even deeper hole.
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But my involvement has put an end to your mother’s five-year ordeal because ReAssure has sent £18,135 to her bank account and started paying her monthly income again.
ReAssure said: “We sincerely regret the distress and inconvenience caused to our customer due to the cessation of her monthly withdrawal payments and the lack of communication surrounding this issue. We also recognise that our handling of subsequent inquiries from her representatives fell short of the standards we expect, and we apologise for the delays and uncertainty this caused.”
It has also paid her compensation of £1,500 and will reimburse her solicitor’s fees of £4,680.
You said: “It is such a relief that this is finally resolved. Thank you so much for showing an interest in this endless saga.”
Our £5,000 Ikea kitchen fail
In February my husband and I bought a kitchen from Ikea for £3,200 and paid £1,800 for installation. Ikea’s website said the installation would typically happen about eight weeks after placing the order, but we were given a date 17 weeks later, in June. Apparently no earlier date was available.
We prepared the room by removing wall tiles and dismantling the cabinets. We lived in a makeshift kitchen for months. When the fitter arrived in June, we realised Ikea had not provided enough legs for the cabinets, which meant that the kitchen couldn’t be completed. We had to postpone the flooring and an electrician and live with extension cables crisscrossing the kitchen for a month, which wasn’t very safe.
The fitter returned a month later and spent five days installing the units in our small kitchen. However, his workmanship was very shoddy — he installed one of the units upside down, threw away parts that were needed for the drawers and trapped electrical wires behind cupboards. He also created a leak in the pipework for the sink, which my husband has repaired.
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I contacted Ikea and sent photos of the fitter’s work. It wanted to send him back to correct his mistakes but we felt we could not trust his work and so refused this. We agreed that Ikea would send replacement items so my husband could fix the problems. It offered us £200 compensation, which I said did not reflect the time it would take him to sort out all the issues, but it said that was its final offer.
The lack of a fully working kitchen has been a major inconvenience, but the dreadful customer service from Ikea has been the most stressful part of the process.
Juliet, Wiltshire
Katherine Denham writes
Under consumer law, a service provided by a company must be performed with “reasonable care and skill”. Considering you had paid £1,800 for installation, £200 was a measly amount of compensation.
After I spoke to Ikea it arranged for a specialist to inspect the kitchen and then three weeks later another fitter visited your home, but you said it took him a whole day to complete just one part of the repair because of how badly a cupboard had been fitted. Even more ridiculous was that Ikea made a mistake by sending the wrong replacement item, which had to be ordered in.
Your kitchen is now finally complete, six months after the first visit, and Ikea is in the process of arranging compensation.
Ikea said: “We sincerely apologise to the customer for the experience she has had, which falls short of the standards we strive to uphold. We take care in how we choose and work with our suppliers, with processes designed to ensure quality and reliability.
“Unfortunately, in this instance, the customer was not adequately advised or supported. We will take the opportunity to learn from this experience.”
Viagogo ruined my daughter’s birthday
As a treat for my daughter’s 16th birthday, I bought three tickets to see Coldplay at Wembley. The tickets cost £790 from the ticket exchange website Viagogo, which said the tickets would be released nearer the time.
I had to download various apps to access the tickets and followed the instructions, but even on the day of the concert, no tickets arrived.
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I was very anxious about this and used Viagogo’s online chat service. I was told the tickets would arrive within an hour, but still nothing appeared. I tried to call Viagogo but struggled to get through. I never received the tickets and we sadly missed the concert. My daughter was really disappointed.
I complained to Viagogo and asked for a refund, pointing out that I should be covered by its guarantee, but it said I don’t qualify. I would appreciate your help with this because I have lost £790.
Name and address supplied
Katherine Denham writes
Your email came hot on the heels of another complaint published in this column this month after a group of friends were unable to attend an Oasis gig because of a problem with tickets they bought from Viagogo.
The company has a guarantee that if there is a problem with tickets, it should give you the choice of either a replacement or a refund, but it didn’t give you any options. Viagogo told me that the transfer was done correctly by the seller, so it couldn’t establish why you never got the tickets. Given the lack of visibility over what had caused the problem, it seemed unreasonable that you were left out of pocket.
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With my help Viagogo has now reimbursed you and offered complimentary tickets worth up to £790. It said: “We are deeply sorry for this customer’s experience. After investigating this, we have proof from the seller that the tickets were transferred correctly, but it appears that she was unable to accept the tickets.”
You said: “After spending so much time trying to sort this out, I can’t believe it is finally resolved. Thank you for your help.”
• £2,293,822— the amount Your Money Matters has won back for readers this year
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