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Case ref:201202828
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Date:February 2014
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Body:Business Stream
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Sector:Water
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Outcome:Some upheld, recommendations
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Subject:leakage
Summary
Mr C complained that Business Stream unreasonably refused to award a burst allowance following a leak at a property he managed. He also complained that their handling of the complaint was inadequate, and that this had caused him an unreasonable amount of additional work and inconvenience.
We did not uphold the first part of the complaint. We found that, in fact, it was Scottish Water who decided to reject the allowance (as in their view too little excess water was used to merit awarding it), which was a decision that they were entitled to make under their procedures for dealing with burst water pipes.
Our investigation did, however, find that Business Stream had not investigated Mr Cs complaint for some eleven months and so we upheld his concerns about their complaints handling. Although there were a number of complex issues being investigated on the site, we found that it was unreasonable for Business Stream not to have taken any action in respect of the complaint.
Recommendations
We recommended that Business Stream:
- apologise in writing for the failings identified in our report; and
- cancel the recovery charges that were applied to Mr C's account while he was awaiting a response to his complaint.