TalkTalk refused to refund my bill

Last year we cancelled my mother’s account with TalkTalk as she was moving into a residential home.

We received a bill summary with a credit balance of £39.36, as a further direct debit had been taken out of her account after the cancellation date.

Retrieving that sum is proving as difficult as getting blood out of a stone.

Can you please help? JANICE SHARP, LEICS

You rang to request the amount be paid back into your mother’s bank account but were told you must give a password.

The only person who knew of any password would have been your father, who had died two years before.

You explained this and that your mother is 97 and very deaf.

That was all to no avail. TalkTalk still held on to this small amount of money.

At my suggestion you had written another letter to TalkTalk mentioning my name to see if that would give wheels to the complaint.

A reply was sent to your mother’s house, rather than your address.

The first sentence referred to your late grandmother, who died 40 years ago.

You spoke to a manager, who was adamant again that TalkTalk could not help you without the password.

She said she couldn’t even look at your mother’s account to verify what money was owed.

You spent about an hour on the phone going over the same things with no progress being made at all. This was, of course, immensely frustrating.

I then became directly involved and 12 days later TalkTalk sent a cheque for £39.36 to your mother’s old home address and apologised for the inconvenience caused.

I prompted it to send flowers to you, which it did.

You say they were lovely, with well-phrased apologetic words.

You want to highlight this episode to stop anyone else being subjected to such a rigmarole. you had started to rely on having this money.

A Capita spokesman said: “We sincerely apologise that the service we provided fell short of the high standard of customer service we strive to provide.”

You have had a letter of apology, your pension is now in order and you have had a full statement of future payments.

I prompted Capita to pay some compensation. This led to £300 being paid to address interest lost due to the delay and including something for goodwill. This you have happily accepted.

Because this took you into a new tax year, you say you now have a new emergency tax code to contend with. Capita has now paid an extra £100 because of this.

You hope this will all provide a wake-up call to Capita in its dealings with clients in the future.