The Sunday Times February 6, 2022 15MONEY
Jill replies
I asked DVLA to confirm in writing that
your friend had not held a driving
licence since January 2015. You said:
“Within a week of you getting involved,
the requested confirmation landed on
our friend’s doormat. I emailed this to
the RAC which very promptly replied to
say that it was happy to arrange a refund.
So my friend will soon get a cheque for
£1,308. It’s a brilliant result and just in
time for his 86th birthday.”
The RAC says it gave your friend a
refund for the years of cover since he
stopped having a licence as a gesture of
goodwill for being such a longstanding
member. It said: “We felt this was the
right thing to do even though we’d
written to him every year about his
renewal. It’s also the case that as a
personal member, he could still have
called us out as a passenger in someone
else’s car.” It added that it does not
normally check if customers have valid
driving licences because it provides
cover for either the vehicle, regardless
of who is driving, or the individual.We want to keep giving
money to our children
My husband and I are both retired. Over
the years we have made gifts to our two
children with the money coming from
our joint bank account. Recently my
husband has been diagnosed with
prostate cancer and his life expectancy
may not be as long as mine. As such,
would it be preferable from the point of
view of inheritance tax for future gifts to
be made from a bank account in my sole
name? We are both aware of inheritance
tax law and the seven-year rule for a gift
to fall outside our respective estates. I
have contacted the government’s Money
Helper advice service and HMRC but
both were reluctant to advise since they
considered it to be a tax planning matter.
Jill replies
Andrew Kidd, a partner specialising in
wills, trusts and estate planning at
solicitors Clintons, says you are correct
to be concerned.
“If the gifts were made from a joint
account then they would be considered
jointly made by this couple,” he said. “If
the husband then died within seven
years, 50 per cent of the value of the gifts
would be deductible from his nil-rate
band. While it wouldn’t directly result in
an inheritance tax liability on his death
(assuming the gifts were relatively small
and did not exceed the nil-rate band), it
would result in a diminished nil-rate
band passing to his wife which would
increase the inheritance tax liability on
her death.”
If the gifts are made solely by you and
you survive seven years after giving
them, they will be clear from your estate
and will not eat into your nil-rate band.
This of course assumes that your
husband dies before you. Hopefully both
of you will be around for many years to
see your children benefit from your gifts.parts in July 2005, for which he received
£40. Before that it had been kept in an
unroadworthy condition for many years
in his garage. There are no records of
driving insurance or MoTs.
He has always used the bus or I have
given him lifts. The RAC tried to argue
that he could use his membership in
other people’s cars, but I have my own
breakdown cover — not with the RAC.
We called the RAC and our friend
spoke to them and asked to cancel his
membership. Since then we have
discovered many membership cards in
unopened envelopes. He was a member
from October 1988 until September 2021.
He has always lived an eccentric
lifestyle, but we feel that as a vulnerable
person he has been exploited.
I raised a written complaint with the
RAC on the same day, asking for a refund
of his membership costs as a gesture of
goodwill. I received a reply on November
10 saying the organisation did not
uphold my complaint but if I could
provide confirmation from the DVLA of
the date his last driving licence expired it
would refund payments from this date.
I have evidence of his licence expiring
in January 2015 on a DVLA renewal form,
and on the DVLA website it says that he
does not hold a driving licence. The RAC
won’t accept this, saying he may have
had a licence in between these dates.
The DVLA insists it must speak to our
friend under data protection laws, but
whenever we visit him and try the DVLA
number the message says that due to
staff shortages it won’t take calls, and
directs us back to the website.RAC has been stinging
my neighbour for years
Our friend of more than 40 years has
been very independent but, now he is
nearly 86, he requires additional
support because he has no family. My
wife and I are holders of lasting power of
attorney regarding his financial affairs
and have been helping him to sort out
his banking.
We discovered a direct debit to the
RAC, for which the last annual payment
was £234. When we asked our friend
about it he said he had been meaning
to cancel it.
I have known him for 40 years and
never seen him drive. He sold his car, a
Triumph Mayflower, to his neighbour forCAN WE HELP YOU?
Please email your questions to Jill
Insley at questionofmoney@sunday-
times.co.uk or write to Question of
Money, The Sunday Times, 1 London
Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF.
Please send only copies of original
documents. Letters should be
exclusive to The Sunday Times.
Advice is offered without legal
responsibility. We regret Jill cannot
reply to everyone who contacts her.W
e bought a property in
June 2021 — a
hairdresser’s on the
ground floor with a flat
above. Eon supplied
electricity to both. I
rang up around July 12
to ask for the flat’s
supply to be
disconnected and the
account closed. On July 19 I followed this
up and as far as I was concerned the
matter was sorted. Our electrician
disconnected the flat’s supply and, using
the supply to the hairdresser’s, we
converted the building into a four-
bedroom dwelling.
On October 20 our guys went to cut
the cable to tidy up and remove the
defunct external meter box for putting
the house on the market, only to find
that the cable was still live. UK Power
Networks came out to make the cable
safe, and is now trying to charge us more
than £1,000 for the privilege.
I have faced a Kafkaesque nightmare
involving numerous calls to Eon. I have
been kept on hold so long I gave up, or
got through only to be cut off. On
multiple occasions I finally got through,
explained the whole situation, only for
them to say they had to redirect me to
another team, who then often
transferred me back to the original team,
and more than once simply put me on
hold until I was sent back to a new
person and had to start all over again.
Meanwhile Eon sent its debt collectors,
Pastdue Credit Solutions, after us. Every
time I was approached by Pastdue I rangmeters outside your house, the first
showing two meters and the second just
one meter and a patch of tarmac.
You told me that although an
electrician from UK Power Networks
had removed one of them in October, he
had recorded his work as repairing the
damage caused by your electrician. To
add insult to injury, UK Power Networks
sent you a bill for £1,061, which included
£383 for filling in the hole left by the
meter. You said: “UK Power Networks
can’t issue the correct paperwork to Eon
so the account can be closed — but they
can issue a bill.”
I asked UK Power Networks to provide
the necessary confirmation to Eon. Six
days later it called you to say its
electrician had now confirmed that he
did cap the supply and that the
disconnection certificate was on its way
to Eon. It waived the £383 for filling the
hole, leaving you to pay £675.
This enabled Eon to resolve the mess
it had made of your bills. It told me that
when you contacted it last July to ask for
the flat’s account to be disconnected, it
advised you how much this would cost
but you declined to make an
appointment. It said its disconnections
team would have explained that part of
the work you required needed to be
carried out by UK Power Networks, but
admits that it did not transfer your call to
the correctly. “In recognition of this, and
our poor service in mistakenly setting up
a new account, we made a £50 offer of
goodwill, which has been accepted,” it
said. It has also refunded the £64 in
charges that you paid since July 2021.QUESTION
OF MONEY
JILL INSLEYEon and paid what I was told was
outstanding, but they continued to
pursue us.
I queried why the amounts on the
debt collection letters were different to
the amounts Eon was asking for when I
rang up to pay but was told that there
was probably some more usage in the
interim. I was also told at one point that
maybe I had closed the gas account, not
the electricity. I accepted this at the time
as perhaps my mistake, but then
remembered that the gas supply to the
flat was cut off before we bought it.
Eventually in November, by talking
through everything with the very helpful
guy at Pastdue we figured out that Eon
had set up a third account for this
property and, while I had paid off the
bills for the original accounts, I was still
being chased for this new one. With that
clarified I paid Pastdue, told Eon about
this misunderstanding and that I was
now all paid up.
In December Eon told me for the first
time that it would only be possible to
close down the flat’s account when Eon
received confirmation from UK Power
Networks that the unwanted supply had
actually been cut. UK Power Networks
removed the supply in October and
apparently it should have automatically
notified Eon — but it didn’t. The Eon
person I spoke to suggested I take that
up with UK Power Networks, which I
did, but they have failed to provide that
confirmation.
Now we have found a plethora of mail
at the property from Eon which
confirms that it has opened another
account as we suspected. Eon was also
saying it will be charging us £55 to send
someone to fit a prepayment meter.
It goes without saying that we will not
be paying another penny to Eon.
Jill replies
It shows how confusing your situation
was that you describe the debt collectors
set on you by Eon as “very helpful”. You
sent me before and after photos of theMean old Eon
made the
bailiffs look
like good guys
ON
EY
LEY