KATIE MORLEY INVESTIGATES

If a company has let you down, our consumer champion is here to fight your corner

LETTER OF THE WEEK Hargreaves Lansdown failed to invest £105,000

My husband and I recently decided to transfer all our investments, pensions and savings to Hargreaves Lansdown (HL). We thought having all our money in one place would make it easier to manage. Also, I’d used HL in the past and held it in high regard. But after making the first tranche of transfers, my opinion of HL has rapidly gone south.

I first phoned it in July. I explained that we wanted to transfer our holdings from alternative fund managers into like-for-like funds, and then deal online to reduce our holdings in some investment funds.

We followed the transfer process correctly, but HL failed to invest our initial £105,000, leaving it sitting in cash without telling me. I noticed only when I logged in to buy and sell. Several phone calls ensued over a number of days, in which HL promised on a daily basis that our cash would be invested and that I would not be left out of pocket.

However, it was a number of weeks before our money was invested and by that point we had lost a considerable amount. As a result of not being invested, we have crystallised £9,000 of losses.

I have complained to HL, but after I chased it for weeks on end, it has not upheld my complaint. Its position is this: although it can see that my instructions were ignored and I called them every day to ask for the funds to be invested in accordance with my wishes, it cannot uphold my complaint because I did not notify it during each phone call that I wished to transact with those funds.

It claims that I am asking for “theoretical trading” gains. This is absolutely not the case. Why should we foot the bill for its mistakes? This is not the HL I invested with many years ago. Something has changed.

AH, HAMPSHIRE

Loved for its exemplary customer service rather than its prices, HL is the John Lewis of the investment shopping world. Given this reputation I’m as surprised as you are to see that it made such an elementary error when you joined.

You transferred an initial £105,000 into your new HL self-invested personal pension in July. As the money was being moved out of company retirement schemes, it had to come across as cash. However, you had provided instructions for HL to invest it, which it ignored. The firm told me that this was due to an error, but hasn’t elaborated.

You asked it why the cash hadn’t been invested as per your original

Write to Katie Morley, Telegraph Money, The Daily Telegraph, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT

Please do not send original documents. Include an address, phone number and separate notes addressed to all organisations authorising them to talk to Katie. For full terms see P5 or visit telegraph.co.uk/go/ consumerchampion. You can also email kminvestigates@ telegraph.co.uk instructions. On Aug 7 it backdated your fund purchases to reflect them, which boosted your portfolio by £3,965. However, you felt this wasn’t a satisfactory resolution.

At the time of the backdating you had wanted to sell your holdings in one of the funds in your portfolio, BlackRock Gold & General. You had not been able to do so as the backdated trades took five days to clear. You had expressed your desire to sell this fund to HL at least once.

But despite this, when you complained, the company didn’t want to know. I can see why its service fell short of your expectations as you moved your hard-earned money to HL to have more control over it, not less.

Following my involvement, HL has reviewed its handling of your complaint and now agrees that it failed to take on board why you felt you had lost out. It has now backdated the sale of your BlackRock Gold & General units to Aug 7. As the units weren’t actually sold until Nov 7, this has added another £6,875 to your portfolio. So now you are back in the position you would have been in had your trading abilities not been hampered by HL.

At £10,840, the potential loss had this not been rectified was even more than your initial calculations.

HL has also paid you £300 to say sorry for the inconvenience caused by this kerfuffle. I am delighted that you have chosen to donate this money to my charity of choice, St Mungo’s, which does excellent work to help homeless people. The kindness shown by Telegraph readers such as you never fails to warm my heart.

My mother is 89 and so frail that she is unable to leave her house easily. Unfortunately I live far away and work full-time. I ordered a Sainsbury’s shop for her to arrive on Monday, as I knew she was completely out of food. The delivery never showed up.

The first I knew about this was on Tuesday evening when I phoned her. I checked my online account and there had been no update on the order. I rang the help centre and was told the store had been having problems with the handsets staff use to tick off orders. I was told no delivery could be made that night.

I suggested that my mother’s order should be put in a taxi, as she didn’t have a morsel to eat at home. I was told this wasn’t possible and the order would be delivered the next day.

On Wednesday morning I was told the order had been cancelled but could be reordered and delivered that evening. This would have left my mother without food for nearly two days. I finally got through to someone else, who arranged for the order to be delivered to my mother within an hour and a half of speaking to me.

This has been incredibly stressful. My mother is vulnerable and was left without any food for well over 24 hours. Nobody at the store seemed to have any idea of the consequences of their failure to deliver or have any motivation to remedy the situation. I thought I was going to have to take a day off work to drive to my mother’s and take her some food myself.

BM, LANCASHIRE

This is simply not good enough from Sainsbury’s, which tells me it is striving to be Britain’s “most inclusive retailer”. An admirable goal this may be, but if your case is anything to go by it has quite some way to go.

I suspect a huge volume of online orders are bought on behalf of elderly and vulnerable people who can’t get out to the supermarket. Many of the accounts will belong to people such as you who, for work and logistical reasons, are not able to be with relatives in person.

Sainsbury’s can’t just leave customers in circumstances like yours without live updates. Your mother went hungry as a result, which should serve as a wake-up call to it. I hope Sainsbury’s will urgently review whether its notification system is appropriate for vulnerable customers and make improvements where necessary. It sounds like its staff could also do with some training on how to handle such situations.

Sainsbury’s has apologised and is providing you with a £30 refund and a £30 gift voucher. In future it says you can add a note on your account to say that your mother requires additional assistance. This is worth bearing in mind if you do order from it again.

A spokesman said: “We have apologised to the customer and her mother for their experience, which did not reflect our usual high standards. We have also provided a gesture of goodwill in the hope they will continue to shop with us in the future.”

Sainsbury’s left 89-yearold mother without food