Virgin hadn’t heard of the St Albans sinkhole so won’t fix my phone

A SINKHOLE opened in our road overnight on October 1. It received national news coverage. The next day we received letters from every service provider except Virgin.

Electricity was restored on October 2 and water and sewerage by October 4. BT phone and internet were restored on October 7. Having heard nothing from Virgin Media, I rang for an update. They said they had not heard of the sinkhole and would send out an engineer.

He appeared the next day and asked what the problem was. Another representative came the following day. Five days passed and I phoned once more, but again they seemed unaware of any problem.

I then received a call back saying it would take at least four weeks to restore services because they needed council authority to proceed.

When I checked the Virgin Media website, its service status facility did not record my loss of service, saying there were no known issues with my telephone.

E. J., St Albans, Herts.

THE great sinkhole of St Albans was on the television and received coverage in national newspapers, so it beggars belief that a media company could have been unaware of it.

The response you received once you had alerted them to the problem was poor to say the least.

According to your letter, the worker who turned up scratched his head and asked what the problem was — despite being escorted to your house, past the massive hole, by security guards.

You wrote to me on October 13. I immediately called Virgin Media and it belatedly swung into action.

A representative visited to assess the problem. They gained access to the area and, after a number of consultations with the council and their agency overseeing safety, fixed the problem.

I asked Virgin Media how they could have been unaware of the problem when every other utility company had acted so swiftly — and why they initially offered such a slow response.

A spokesman says: ‘ While our team on the ground was well aware of the issue and restored services as soon as possible, a failure in our process meant our frontline callcentre staff didn’t have access to the full details of this specific issue to discuss with customers.

‘We apologise to residents for the frustration this may have caused.’

Virgin has also promised that every customer who lost service will be entitled to compensation.

MY HUSBAND was born in 1931 and receives a UK state pension. However, we keep reading about a state second pension. We have no idea what this is. Could you explain?

Y. J., Mallorca, Spain.

YOUR husband would have started to receive his state pension in 1996, which is six years before the state second pension (S2P) was launched, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that neither of you know much about it.

It is an extra state pension based, to an extent, on earnings. It was introduced to boost the pensions of those on lower and middle incomes.

It replaced the state earningsrelated pension scheme and provided a better outcome for people on up to around £32,000 a year and a poorer one for those earning more. Having retired in 1996, your husband may have had his pension boosted by Serps and its forerunner, graduated pension.

How much Serps he receives will depend on whether or not he was in an occupational pension scheme for much of his career.

If he was, it’s likely he was opted out of Serps by his employer because his occupational pension would be expected to provide greater benefits.

S2P and the basic state pension will be succeeded by a new system starting next April.

WHEN I logged into my Barclays account on Sunday, September 27, I was stunned to see it said I was £92,960 overdrawn. I was worried that someone had hacked into my account and taken out £100,000.

I called Barclays immediately, but was told the fraud department was closed. I went into my local branch the following morning, but all they would tell me was that I had to wait 72 hours for the bank to investigate and until then I couldn’t use my account.

Barclays finally called me on the Wednesday morning and asked me questions about recent transactions. My account was up and running as normal that afternoon.

But they refuse to tell me what happened. On my statement there is no record of my account being overdrawn. It’s my money, so why am I being kept in the dark?

G. D., Wisbech, Cambs.

THIS has taken a lot of unravelling. To begin with, let me put your mind at rest: you were not the victim of fraud. Incredible as it sounds, Barclays is responsible.

The bank’s fraud system picked up on some unusual transactions on the Saturday — these were ten large deposits from a major retailer.

To the system, they looked like refunds, but your account showed you hadn’t bought anything from the company. That’s highly unusual.

So the bank decided to put in place a little-known fraud tactic — it earmarked £100,000 in your account.

This effectively put you hugely overdrawn, meaning you couldn’t withdraw funds, but money could go in. The idea is that if this money proved to be fraudulent, it would be set aside to repay to the victims.

Barclays was within its rights to investigate, but where it has failed you is in not giving you a proper explanation to what happened and why it’s taken so long to help. It should have treated you as innocent until proven guilty.

Even though you called the bank and went to a branch it would not let you explain. It was not until three days after the account was frozen that Barclays bothered to call and ask about the unusual activity.

At that point you were able to say you’d bought ten iPhone 6s models and sold them to a retailer.

A spokesman for Barclays says: ‘ When we identify suspicious activity, timely action is taken to protect the customer’s balance.

‘An investigation is performed to satisfy ourselves that the account holder is the intended recipient of those credits.

‘As a result of being able to speak with the customer, we were able to determine the nature of the transactions, allowing us to remove the block.

‘We are sorry that the customer was inconvenienced while our investigations were taking place.’