This freak accident is driving me mad!

LAST July, stones were thrown up from a mower on an articulated arm of a tractor which dented the rear off-side door of my car and smashed the windscreen of another driver.

The Wrexham Council representative in charge of the works said the council’s insurer, Zurich, would pay.

Zurich has consistently obstructed my claim and denied the other driver exists, even though I have been in contact with him and they have paid the excess for his windscreen damage.

In February, I finally received a letter saying the claim had been passed to Zurich’s negotiating unit, but have since heard nothing.

Please can you sort this out.

P. G., Huddersfield. ZURICH’S attitude to you has ranged from dismissive to downright arrogant. They have denied the existence of the other driver and attempted to dodge what you feel is a legitimate claim.

One letter you received said: ‘The council have in place a satisfactory system of inspection for the checking of obvious stones prior to the commencement of mowing or strimming works.’

This conjures up the ludicrous image of a man in overalls crawling along the road casting aside any stone that might spring up!

Zurich has now sent you an apology and settled your claim for £475 in full. It has also added £50 worth of vouchers as a goodwill gesture. It says the initial information it received from Wrexham Council was that checks had been carried out for stones and debris before the works were carried out. But those working at the site agreed with your version of events.

Incidentally, court rulings in the past have tended to favour insurers who deny liability in similar cases when machinery is well-maintained and reasonable steps have been taken to check for objects that might be thrown up by the blades. LAST year, my sister and I noticed that our trust account with Birmingham Midshires (BM) was paying only 1 pc interest. So, last November, we attempted to move the £18,869 into a four-year, fixed-rate bond, paying 4.2 pc.

BM asked for a death certificate for my mother, who died in 1989. A silly saga followed, with it claiming it could not deal with trustees when the beneficiary had died. But my mother was not the beneficiary; this was money she had left for us in trust. Its latest request has been that we provide a Statutory Declaration signed by a solicitor.

G. A. S., Warwick. THIS absurd series of events had been trailing on for more than four months. The error dates back to when you opened the account. Instead of opening it as a trustee account, Birmingham Midshires opened it as a sole account.

This resulted in extra information being requested and you becoming entangled in their web. BM contacted you as soon as I alerted them to your problem.

It has apologised for the error and is offering to put you into the four-year bond you wanted. It will backdate the interest to November 11, 2011, when you first attempted to open it.

It has also offered you a £250 goodwill payment in recognition of their error and the inconvenience caused to you.

A spokesman told me: ‘We would like to acknowledge and apologise for the problems Mr S has experienced due to an error on our part.’ MY TWO children each received a £10 postal order in 2002.

I put them ‘safely’ away until we recently found them. I wrote to the Post Office which has rejected our request they be honoured.

I know they are very out-of-date, but it seems unfair that the Post Office