Rightio charged my elderly mother £353… to change a FUSE: CRANE ON THE CASE

My mother is 93, disabled and partially sighted. In October, her downstairs toilet stopped flushing, so after a quick Google seek I called home repair company Rightio to send someone out to fix it.

The toilet is an ‘upflush’ toilet fitted with a macerator, so is connected to the electrics. It turned out that it just needed a new fuse.

However, Rightio charged £352.80 for this. Can this be right? J.D, Essex

Quick fix? The repair on the toilet took 41 minutes, but cost more than £350 (stock image)

Helen Crane, This is Money’s consumer champion, replies: The repair might have left your mother’s toilet feeling flush, but you certainly weren’t after being hit with a £350-plus bill. 

Rightio is a Birmingham-based home repair company with a network of 250 plumbers, heating technicians, drainage experts, electricians and locksmiths around the country.

Customers can contact Rightio in an emergency and it will hook them up with a local expert to come and resolve the problem.

Its website says it delivers an ‘unparalleled service delivered with urgency, reliability, and compassion,’ but sadly that was not your encounter. 

You phoned the firm on a Saturday morning, explaining that your 93-year-old mother’s only accessible toilet had stopped flushing.  

You told them it was an emergency, and Rightio said it had engineers in the area and that someone would reach in ‘a few hours’.

You were also asked to hand over your card details. You told me you wouldn’t normally do this before the work had been carried out, but you were told you had to furnish this to ensure the booking and you were anxious to get the problem fixed for your elderly mother.

Later that day, you were told no one would be available until Monday. 

You couldn’t be at your mother’s house that day to face the repair person so the appointment was booked for Tuesday. 

Had the plumber turned up as soon as you called on Saturday, you might have expected to pay more for an emergency call-out – but paying more than £350 for an appointment you waited two days for doesn’t seem right.

Once they did turn up, they ran some checks and found that the problem was a simple replacement fuse. 

Once a new one was in place, the toilet was working fine.

It was only afterwards that you learned of the huge bill.

So how did Rightio defend the charge? According to its log, the engineer was at your mother’s house for 41 minutes. 

In this time he diagnosed the problem which was that the fuse needed replacing, put in a new one and checked it was working. According to his report, the macerator was not blocked at all. 

You were told before the appointment that there was no call-out fee, but that the first half an hour would be charged at £160, or £147 plus VAT. 

Even if the labour was charged at the same rate for the next half hour, the cost for 40 minutes (£54 per 10 minutes) would be £214, excluding VAT. 

But the job sheet you were given shows that the cost was made up of £294 for labour and £58.50 in VAT. 

Helping out: J.D was anxious to get the toilet fixed for her elderly mother, who is disabled

It also shows that no parts were needed, so the whole cost was for the plumber’s labour – so the £352.80 figure doesn’t add up. 

Given the length of the appointment, that would add up to a cost of £440 per hour or a whopping £7.35 per minute.

You queried the charge with Rightio, but it said the charges were correct and that you had been informed of these on the phone. But you say you wouldn’t have agreed to such a high charge. 

I contacted Rightio to ask it to check your billing again. 

Firstly, it suggested the issue was not as simple as just a fuse change. It said that the plumber ‘cleared a blockage’. That is somewhat confusing as they wrote clearly on the job sheet which you have shown me, ‘macerator not blocked’. 

On to the charges, and Rightio’s representative told me that you would have been told on your initial call that the half-hourly rate was £162 plus VAT.  

This was then reduced by £15 per hour to £147 plus VAT because the initial appointment was rescheduled. 

Normally, Rightio charges a lower rate for weekday appointments than weekend ones, but it said when your mother’s appointment was moved from Saturday to Tuesday the rate was not amended and this was one of the reasons for the size of the bill. 

Rightio also said it didn’t apply its usual £10 bill discount for old age pensioners which was an ‘oversight’. 

It also charged you for two full half an hours, even though the engineer only worked for 11 minutes of the second half an hour. In these cases it said it can sometimes consider a ‘partial refund’. 

That rounding up is a sneaky charge in my opinion. It is easy to work out the per-minute cost, so why not just charge customers for the actual time worked?  

Due to all of these issues, I am pleased to say you have been offered a refund of £165.20. This leaves your total bill for the repair at £187.60. 

A Rightio spokesman said: ‘We apologise for any inconvenience caused and assure you and her that corrective measures are being taken internally to ensure these mistakes are not repeated.’

Where’s my Child Trust Fund cash?  

I turned 18 at the end of August, but I still haven’t been able to access the £820 in my Child Trust Fund. 

I am at university studying to be an architect, and the materials are really expensive. I could do with the extra cash. 

I’ve written to and emailed NatWest with my details several times, but I just keep getting letters saying I need to send ID.

I already had my ID documents verified and signed by a NatWest branch worker, and was told they were sent to the Child Trust Fund department in the head office. 

I am now calling NatWest several times every day, and either cannot get through, or am told by the person on the phone that they cannot access the account. 

Can you help? Y.G, Milton Keynes 

Building up cash: Y.G is keen to get her Child Trust Fund money to help pay for university, where she is studying to be an architect (stock image)

Helen Crane replies: You have hit a brick wall in your efforts to get your money from NatWest.

I have previously covered young people’s struggles getting hold of Child Trust Fund cash from NatWest, which was one of the largest providers of the accounts when they existed between 2002 and 2011. 

The process has been plagued with delays since the first children to benefit from the free government money started turning 18 in 2020. 

I contacted NatWest to ask about your account – and why young people were still having problems getting their money, after it assured us in summer 2022 that things would be back to normal ‘within a few weeks’. 

In your case, NatWest told me things had been held up not by admin delays but by the bank’s fraud checks.

After you spoke to the bank on the phone, it put a temporary hold on your account while it double-checked some of the information you had provided and made sure that you were who you said you were. 

It is frustrating this wasn’t communicated to you, but you did eventually pass the fraud check so the money is now on its way.  

As spokesman said: ‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience [the customer] experienced in accessing her Child Trust Fund account. The funds have now been released.’

You have now told me the money is in your account, so I hope you can put it to good use on materials for your course. 

NatWest also told me last year’s administrative issues are now fixed, and that young people shouldn’t encounter big delays accessing their Child Trust Fund money. 

If you have waited for a long time for yours, let me know: helen.crane@thisismoney.co.uk.