I receive a phone call from Nadine at Asprea. Nadine tells me that she just needs to check with Barclays to see whether my policy provides matching items cover. I ask what that is and she tells me that some policies stipulate that matching items will be replaced if necessary. If I don’t have this cover then she can only offer to increase the contribution to the non insured tiling to 50%. Whilst Nadine has been perfectly reasonable to deal with and is only working within the constraints of her authority level, I don’t feel happy with this approach. I point out that I don’t remember anybody mentioning that I had to specifically state that I wanted matching items cover. Nadine comments that this is a very common complaint and in fact in the New Year, there will be changes made to make sure that it is clearer to customers. I tell Nadine that if they had made it clearer to me when I took the policy out I might have made a different decision on whether or not to proceed. Its all well and good saying that it’s been recognised that it needs to be made clearer, but that doesn’t help all the poor policy holders that it wasn’t made clear to! I tell Nadine that I am not happy with the outcome today and would like my complaint progressing to Stage 2 of the complaints procedure. She agrees to do this and tells me she will confirm in an email what we have discussed.
Later in the day I receive an email from Nadine confirming that unfortunately, I do not have the matching items cover she referred to earlier and she confirms that all she can do is increase the contribution towards the cost of replacing the undamaged tiling to 50%. She makes some rather half hearted attempts to justify and gloss over the delays that have occurred and tells me that having spoken to the contractor it appears that it has not been possible to salvage the existing tiles. She confirms that she will progress my complaint to stage 2 of the complaints procedure. No mention is made about the point I raised in my letter that the tiles cost £30 +VAT when I bought them 4 years ago and that I have only been given an allowance of £20 +VAT which also has to cover the labour cost. I email her back to tell her that she has not covered this point and tell her that I can provide the invoice if necessary. I also ask her if she can tell me how much of the tiling would be classed as covered by the policy and what the labour cost of the tiling will be.
Nadine emails me back to ask me to send in the invoice. She offers to send me a copy of the schedule of works but regrets she cannot give me a costing breakdown. I email a copy of the invoice back to her and advise her that having looked at the invoice, it can be seen clearly that I had been able to get a 33% discount on the cost of the tiles when I bought them as I used my father in law’s business account to get them. This means that the actual cost of the tiles was in fact £40 a square metre + VAT rather than £30 +VAT as I originally stated. To obtain a comparable tile in today’s market would cost considerably more. I advise Nadine that I need to know the costs involved to me so that I can make a decision on what to do. If I can’t afford to pay for the additional tiling, regardless of how bad it will look I will have no alternative but to accept that there will be different tiles in the shower cubicle than there are in the rest of the bathroom.
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