How I went to war with TalkTalk — and won
Fed up of being fobbed off by foreign call centres, SAM GREENHILL snapped and took the telecoms giant to court. So could you do the same?
MY David and Goliath battle with TalkTalk started innocuously enough two-and-a-half years ago when i picked up the phone to another cold call. On the end of the line was a TalkTalk saleswoman who offered an upgrade to our home broadband. We would pay £10 a month extra and receive a faster ‘fibre’ internet service.
We agreed, and the saleswoman arranged what she said would be a ‘quick and easy’ visit by an engineer.
if only. He made our internet whizz faster all right. We were delighted — until we found out what he had done to achieve this feat.
it was only after he was long gone that we realised he’d cut off all of the telephone extensions in our house.
We discovered this a few days later when my wife tried to dial 999 to summon an ambulance for our young son, and found all the phones were dead. (Our boy had fallen and bumped his head, and was vomiting. a paramedic was called eventually, and our son was fine.)
My efforts to alert TalkTalk to this telephone fault descended into farce.
it was like Groundhog Day. i spoke to a different person in its Far Eastern call centre each time, none of whom knew anything about my previous calls.
Few seemed remotely bothered about our problem. One cheerfully tried to steer the conversation towards selling me a television package. another asked the same security question three times.
Eventually it was established that our ‘master socket’ still worked, meaning we could use that to make and receive calls, but all the phone extensions around the house remained broken.
TalkTalk kept blaming Openreach — the BT firm that installs broadband for TalkTalk — and saying i should take it up with BT. Yet our contract is with TalkTalk, not BT, and it was TalkTalk that sent the Openreach engineer to our home.
TalkTalk’s call centre offered me a desultory £5 discount to make up for the problems. We said they should come and fix the damage. During December 2014, TalkTalk sent a further three engineers. Engineer number two blamed the BT Openreach engineer before him. The third one simply rolled his eyes and made a derogatory comment about TalkTalk’s foreign call centre. The fourth engineer, from BT, blamed his predecessors. None of them fixed the damage. When i called the hopeless call centre yet again, they thought i was a man called ‘Mr Michael Derbyshire’. i gave up. i wrote a polite letter of complaint to TalkTalk’s chief executive, Baroness Harding. Her office refused to fix the damage, but eventually offered a £10 discount off each of our next six phone bills by way of a ‘goodwill gesture’. i was nearly ready to throw in the towel. i suggested to TalkTalk that i would settle for £300 and an apology — so we could all move on. But TalkTalk stuck to its guns, saying the £60 discount was its ‘full and final’ offer. and then it added insult to injury. it sent a letter accusing us of ‘only noticing’ after two months that our phones were not working. The reality was we had ‘noticed’ when we desperately needed the emergency services, but TalkTalk only took notice of our complaint after two months of phoning its call centre.
That was the moment i resolved not to let it drop. it had become a matter of principle.
First, i lodged a case with the Communications Ombudsman, which spent eight months investigating. its conclusion was to suggest TalkTalk increase its overall offer by a paltry £50.
Rejecting this, i then paid £115 to lodge a case with the small claims court, asking TalkTalk to pay to fix the damage. anyone can do this — you don’t have to be a trained lawyer and it would cost about the same in Scotland.
There is a saying that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client, and at one point it seemed my small quest for justice would cost my wife and i dearly.
i had prepared the case myself and it got off to a bumpy start. in their wisdom, the people who run England’s courts decided for unknown reasons to allocate my case to something called the ‘fast track of the High Court’.
at first, i thought this sounded great as it would pile the pressure on TalkTalk.
But then i got some advice from Marc Gander, an ex-university law
lecturer who set up the Consumer Action Group, which campaigns for consumer rights. He said the fast track was where corporate giants clash in titanic courtroom battles with armies of barristers, costing both sides a fortune.
And unlike the small claims court, where if you lose you usually do not have to pay the other side’s costs, I would be exposed to potentially gargantuan bills.
After studying the paperwork I’d submitted to the court, Marc sent me an email. I read it aloud to my wife over dinner that night. It went: ‘Dear Sam, I hope that it won’t depress you too much to say you are not dealing with it in a very effective way. I am afraid that you have demonstrated very clearly that you are not altogether sure of what you are doing.’
He listed all the things I had done wrong, such as presenting my whole case rather than a summary when first lodging my claim.
‘You have disclosed far too much information at this early stage,’ he told me. ‘Documents such as exhibits, and so on, would not normally be presented to the other side at this point. You would begin simply with your “particulars of claim” — a short list of points.’
I had also failed to mention ‘the legal basis’ for my claim — in other words I hadn’t named what law had been breached.
At the end of his note Marc said: ‘I’m sure it doesn’t make very happy reading for you. I’m sorry. I think it is rather a mess at the moment.’
My wife thought this was all quite funny, until I told her the bit about us being exposed to massive costs if, for any reason, I was not capable of defeating TalkTalk’s battlehardened lawyers.
Thankfully, to TalkTalk’s credit, they did not think the case was worthy of being fast-tracked in the High Court any more than we did. The court people were eventually persuaded to send it to the ‘small claims track’ of a lower court.
But it was clear TalkTalk’s legal department could sense it was dealing with an idiot when it came to matters of the law.
They lodged a detailed defence to my case, full of legal jargon and references to the Civil Procedure Rules. They outsourced the case to a private solicitors, Mason Hayes.
This firm’s 52-year-old managing director, Marcus Hayes, was in charge of preparing TalkTalk’s case. He charges an eye-watering £330 an hour and, according to his profile, specialises in ‘the most complex and high-value commercial work’.
On the eve of the court hearing, I was served with a statement of costs totalling £2,824, representing about six hours’ work by Mr Hayes, plus VAT. TalkTalk also served me with a similar £610 statement for its in-house lawyer.
Although such sums are a drop in the ocean to a big company, the suggestion was clear: this was what I risked having to pay if I lost.
It felt like a bullying attempt to frighten me off, as Marc had said these costs were not recoverable in a small claims case.
On the day of the hearing, TalkTalk’s in-house solicitor said he would be urging the judge to dismiss my claim on the basis that Openreach was to blame.
My contract with TalkTalk only covered the supply of telecommunications services, he said, and physically upgrading broadband did not fall under this description.
I had ‘failed to identify any grounds’ on which I was entitled to claim losses and the company would demand the claim be struck out ‘as an abuse of the Court’s process’, as I had not specified the law I was accusing it of breaching.
OTHeR planks of TalkTalk’s defence included arguing it had been ‘necessary’ to cut off our phone extensions. It insisted we ‘always had a working phone line’ as the master socket had worked all along.
But by now, with enormous thanks to Marc and the Consumer Action Group’s guidance, I had repaired the glaring holes in my case.
In my witness statement, I set out my claim that TalkTalk had breached The Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982, which states that suppliers must ‘carry out the service with reasonable care and skill’.
Marc did not think the judge would allow TalkTalk to shift the blame to Openreach, but this was never tested because TalkTalk settled the case minutes before the hearing.
As we waited to be called at the County Court of Shoreditch and Clerkenwell in London, the firm’s in-house solicitor offered me £1,000 to walk away. He warned me this was the highest amount they were prepared to pay, and I could take it or leave it.
I phoned the Consumer Action Group for advice. How about £1,500? I asked the man from TalkTalk. He made a brief phone call and accepted the offer.
In exchange, I agreed to sign a piece of paper stating TalkTalk was not liable for any damage.
The pair of us were called in to see a judge, who hand-wrote a court order giving TalkTalk 21 days to send me a cheque. He peered over his glasses at the TalkTalk solicitor and said: ‘I’m sure 21 days won’t be necessary?’ The company posted the cheque the next day.
It took a lot more effort and stress than I expected, but taking TalkTalk to court had worked wonders.
In all, including its own legal costs, TalkTalk’s decision to reject my £300 settlement offer two years ago has cost it around £6,000.
Given what it put us through to resolve a straightforward complaint, I cannot say that upsets me.