they seem to threaten court rather than speak to you like any other company would who havent been paid.
This is very true – in fact I found it impossible to get to speak to someone over a period of about six weeks last year, in fact I had to put in an FOI to get hold of their own official guidelines on the application of the new rules, which it turned out they hadn’t even written until after my FOI was in, and after they gave me a summons because they didn’t actually understand the rules themselves.
It was most satisfying to sit in front of a bench of magistrates and show them the relevant points in the legislation, the government guidelines, the six emails I had sent to the council trying to resolve the issue, then the FOI request, then the internal rules I had got hold of, and happily pull apart the council, with their own solicitor/officer accepting I was right – and have it dismissed, I pertinently made the point that it was only my tenacity that had caused this, and a lot of far more vulnerable people would have just paid, or even been ruled against and had bailiffs sent. Lady in the court from CAB for other cases took all my work to use to help other people 😀