Tony Hetherington Stay safe . . . and ignore £208 bill for this booklet
P.K. writes: My business was sent a booklet called ‘Stay Safe’ by the Children’s Information Centre, with a letter thanking us for our involvement. We were then harassed for payment of £208, which would be reduced to £189 if we paid that same day. When we questioned this, we kept being told we had made a verbal contract. However, we would not agree to anything like this, verbal or otherwise. And when we asked to hear a recording of the verbal agreement, the invoice was immediately cancelled.
THE first thing to understand about the Children’s Information Centre is that despite its name, it is not a charity. It is a limited company, aiming to make a profit by sending booklets to schools after billing businesses for hundreds of pounds to pay for them.
The invoice you received demands £189 for booklets, plus £19 for ‘storage and shipping’. There is no mention of how many booklets this covers. It could be a hundred or more, or it could be just one. Why you should be charged for the company’s own storage of its booklets is not explained. And where the booklets would be shipped is unclear, too.
The booklet and invoice show the Children’s Information Centre Limited (CIC) has a London telephone number and is based in Wenlock Road in North London.
But telephone numbers can be diverted t o anywhere, and t he address is one I see regularly. It belongs to a company formation agency, and literally hundreds of companies are registered there without having any physical presence. CIC is actually run from AshtonUnder-Lyne in Greater Manchester, where its owner and director is 26year-old Paul Chalmers.
His company claims to be ‘a nationwide publisher of informative, educational material based around the issue affecting the lives and development of at-risk and vulnerable children across the UK’, so I asked him what he publishes apart from the small Stay Safe booklet which is simply common sense advice about such things as how to cross the road and what to do if your home is on fire. He offered no details.
His website says: ‘ Our carefully curated publications are created by industry leaders in safeguarding and child welfare in line with the Government’s curriculum and guidelines to ensure maximum impact with students and help support their welfare .’ Who are these industry leaders? And who actually authored the Stay Safe booklet? Chalmers would not tell me.
There are some clues, though. CIC claims to be in partnership with the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. Unfortunately, the Society says this is simply not true.
The CIC website also carries an impressive article about lessons to be learned from seven successful schools. But the article has been copied from the work of the genuine and respectable organisation TeachFirst. It told me: ‘We do not have any relationship with them and did not give permission to replicate the article.’
Much of the CIC website is similarly misleading. As well as using the logo of the Royal Geographical Society, it displays a range of names and logos including Google Earth, the Association for Education In Science, and even the United Nations World Food Programme. CIC claims to have ‘partnered’ with them all.
All that Paul Chalmers of CIC would say is that the invoice he sent you has been cancelled. He offered no evidence of any verbal contract, and explained: ‘We normally book by e-signature with lockdown and people working remotely.’
I asked for a copy of any order he received from you, but he produced nothing. Chalmers refused to say how much his Stay Safe booklets cost to produce, or how many your £ 208 would have bought. But businesses that hear from him, or receive unexpected i nvoices, might like to ask the same questions. No answers, no deal.