Hayley

Jun 15, 2024

Legislation? GDPR? What’s that?

Rented via the Birmingham branch after they acquired Centrick Lettings. Post acquisition, a third party company, instructed on behalf of John Shepherd/Centrick illegally closed all of my utility bill accounts (accounts in my own name) with my utility suppliers without providing me any notice. It wasn’t until I received notification directly from the supplier to advise I was to expect my final bill that i was made aware of the issue. When calling my property manager (Bethany Turner) to discuss the issue I was initially advised ‘oh yeah this is an error that has happened to other flats too’ and that I would need to resolve the issue with the suppliers myself. It wasn’t until I told them the suppliers were refusing to discuss the matter with me now the accounts were no longer under my name that they then agreed to assist. I work in the Property Management industry myself and fully appreciate that errors can occur from time to time, however this was simply the result of incompetence and complacency. The service received when trying to resolve this was also subpar at best, I even escalated the matter to somebody more ‘senior’ (Kai Rodney) within the company and didn’t receive acknowledgment of my email for 3 weeks. Again, appreciating how busy and overwhelming this industry can be it does not change the fact that I was unable to have access to my utility accounts for almost two months with little to no communication on the matter. It has since transpired that they did exactly the same for my council tax too, removing my name from the council tax for the property while I was there and only now after having left the property am i being issued with a bill for the period they decided to remove me from the account. To add insult to injury, my contact details were issued to a maintenance company (once I’d vacated the property at the end of my tenancy) in regard to gaining access in order to do works in the flat I no longer lived in, meaning by no great surprise the incompetent staff members had somehow managed to provide my details to the contractors knowing full well I was no longer the tenant in the property which is worrying when in this industry, and many others, Data Protection is a serious matter. I have seen that Chris Blick is listed in the responses on trust pilot as a point of contact for escalation of such complaints. Ironically, despite copying Chris into my email correspondence he never did take a minute to provide a response of any kind, but it did encourage Bethany to respond in a slightly more timely manner. I welcome Chris to provide an attempt to justify my aforementioned experience and his employee’s truly shocking and incompetent service.