Lisa Ferguson took the energy giant to court over a string of
threatening letters she received demanding payment of gas bills
that she was not responsible for. Ferguson had switched suppliers
but continued to receive demands and threats from British Gas for
eight months.
Ferguson repeatedly wrote to the company and telephoned it to
inform it that she had switched suppliers. She wrote to the
company's chairman but received no reply and alerted the energy
watchdog to her plight.
Even when British Gas employees told her that the matter was
settled and the activity would stop, the letters and threats kept
coming. Ferguson runs her own property investment business and was
told that the failure to pay the bills would affect her credit
rating.
Ferguson took a case claiming that British Gas's behaviour was
unlawful under the Protection from Harassment Act, which created a
civil and a criminal offence of harassment.
That law says:
"A person must not pursue a course of conduct -
(a) which amounts to harassment of another, and
(b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the
other.
(2) For the purposes of this section, the person whose course of
conduct is in question ought to know that it amounts to harassment
of another if a reasonable person in possession of the same
information would think the course of conduct amounted to
harassment of the other."
British Gas said that the behaviour was not serious enough to
amount to harassment and that as a company, rather than an
individual, it could not be caught by the legislation. It argued
that Ferguson would have to identify an individual directing the
activity in order for harassment to be demonstrated.
British Gas asked the the Court of Appeal to throw the case out
before it reached a full hearing because it had no basis.
The Court refused and said there was a case to answer. British
Gas has now settled the case with Ferguson, but would not reveal
how much it has paid her.
A litigation expert at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind
OUT-LAW.COM, said that the case showed that companies should pay
close attention to the way they collect debts.
"It was important in this case that the customer had told
British Gas so many times that the debt was disputed," said Chris
Breen, a litigation specialist at Pinsent Masons, the law firm
behind OUT-LAW.COM. "Companies chasing debts need to be aware that
the way they pursue debts could be scrutinised and subject to
claims under the Act."
"They need to ensure that their complaints handling procedure is
effective and linked up and when they do chase debts that they
don't do it in an overly aggressive and threatening way," he
said.
Lord Justice Jacob, giving the ruling of the Court, said that
British Gas's arguments about why its behaviour stopped short of
harassment held no water.
"[British Gas] sought to downgrade [the behaviour] by saying
that Ms Ferguson knew the claims and threats were unjustified," he
said in the ruling. "That is absurd: a victim of harassment will
almost always know that it is unjustified. The Act is there to
protect people against unjustified harassment. Indeed if the
impugned conduct is justified it is unlikely to amount to
harassment at all."
The company also tried to argue that because automated systems
created the correspondence it did not amount to harassment.
"[British Gas] also made the point that the correspondence was
computer generated and so, for some reason which I do not really
follow, Ms Ferguson should not have taken it as seriously as if it
had come from an individual," said the ruling. "But real people are
responsible for programming and entering material into the
computer. It is British Gas's system which, at the very least,
allowed the impugned conduct to happen."
"No amount of writing and telephoning had stopped the system so
far – at times it must have seemed like a monster machine out of
control moving relentlessly forward – a million miles from the
'world class level of service' (letter of 9th January) which
British Gas says it aims to offer," the ruling said.
Lord Justice Jacob rejected British Gas's claims that in order
to win a harassment case a person would need to demonstrate that
the company had "actual knowledge" that its behaviour was
harassment.
"As at present it seems to me that all the Act requires of the
victim is to identify the course of conduct and what passed between
the victim and the alleged harasser. The court is then notionally
to put knowledge of that and of any other relevant information into
the mind of this reasonable person. The court then decides whether
that person would consider that the course of conduct amounts to
harassment," he said.
Breen said that the ruling should leave companies in no doubt
about their potential culpability. "It is clear from this case that
a corporation, large or small, can be responsible for harassment
and can't rely on the argument that there is no 'controlling mind'
in the company and that the left hand didn't know what the right
hand was doing," he said.
Breen also said that companies may find that they face action on
similar grounds under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading
Regulations. "Those have prohibitions against aggressive commercial
practices, so it is not inconceivable that companies will find that
rather than someone pursuing a court case under the Act at their
own expense they just complain under the Regulations to Trading
Standards," he said.
Lord Justice Jacob praised Ferguson for taking a stand against
the company at great personal financial risk. "It is one of the
glories of this country that every now and then one of its citizens
is prepared to take a stand against the big battalions of
government or industry. Such a person is Lisa Ferguson," he said.
"Because she funds the claim out of her personal resources, she
does so at considerable risk: were she ultimately to lose she would
probably have to pay British Gas's considerable costs."
He told British Gas to pay its own costs of £20,368.75 and
Ferguson's costs of £10,575.
Reader Kieran Daly
says: Only a High Court judge could make a comment as
infuriatingly complacent as his remark about the "the glories" of
this situation. On the contrary, this case demonstrates once again
the general uselessness of English civil law to the genuinely
average man, as opposed to those with £10K to risk.
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