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Source http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate...3A10598#g827.2
Mark Todd, MP South Derbyshire, house of commons debate, 18th December 2007
This brief debate will focus on a tragic death, one critical error and a series of other errors and misjudgments that contributed to a lady's death. I speak of Mrs. Beryl Brazier, who lived in my constituency for some considerable time. She moved house, and I will deal with the implications of her doing so.
Let me go through the sequence of events. Mrs. Brazier opened a credit account with GE Capital bank in 1998. She managed it perfectly well until she moved house in 2005, when she had arrears of about £500. She did not move far—just to another home in the Swadlincote urban area. GE Capital sought to trace her, using a tracing company, Westcot credit services, which subcontracted the task to another company, DataTrace. That company successfully traced her and spoke to her on the phone. She was perfectly amicable and provided all the details requested.
At the same time, the company was tracing a number of other debtors, including a Mr. Noorullah, but it failed to provide a tracing address for him. In preparing the tracing report going back to Westcot credit services, it used a formatted document in which Mr. Noorullah's and Mrs. Brazier's data, which included her telephone number, were transposed. Thus Mr. Noorullah was reported as living at Mrs. Brazier's address. GE Capital reported this address for Mr. Noorullah to Experian, the national credit reference agency, as a live address. It continued to pursue Mr. Noorullah's address, because it had a debt to recover from him as well. The letter was returned. The address was queried with Westcot, but Westcot did not pass the query back to the originator of the research, DataTrace, and there is no record of exactly how it attempted to check the address. It seems unlikely that the phone contact provided was actually used.
Westcot reported back to GE Capital that Mr. Noorullah was no longer at that address; it provided no more information than that. Curiously enough, and possibly because there is no evidence that Mrs. Brazier was anything other than an honest woman and may have provided forwarding information, GE Capital had by then received notification of Mrs. Brazier's correct address, which was held on the system. GE Capital then updated the Experian database for Mr. Noorullah with a "Gone away" marker, indicating that that address was unreliable. It then decided for its own business reasons to sell on Mr. Noorullah's debt to a company called Aktiv Kapital, which contracted another company, Thames Credit, to purse the debt. For reasons that are not entirely clear, although GE Capital now knew Mrs. Brazier's correct address, it seemed not to have pursued her for her own debt.
It appears that Thames Credit sourced the address for Mr. Noorullah from Experian. That should have meant that the address provided was indicated as not being reliable; as I have explained, it would have had a "Gone away" marker on it. Thames Credit or Aktiv Kapital appear to have held other debts for Mr. Noorullah, which were combined with the one owed to GE Capital to produce a sum in excess of £15,000. Letters addressed to Mr. Noorullah were sent to Mrs. Brazier's address. They were initially returned, just as earlier correspondence from GE Capital was returned as "Not known at this address", as hon. Members will recall. However, they continued to arrive.
Mrs. Brazier then visited the local citizens advice bureau in Swadlincote, on 23 February 2006, with a family member. The CAB asserts that it rang Thames Credit to say that Mr. Noorullah did not live at Mrs. Brazier's address. Although the CAB has provided convincing detail of the call, describing the person answering it and the conversation that followed, Thames Credit claims to have no record of such a call.
Mrs. Brazier's daughter reported that the visit to the citizens advice bureau had cheered Mrs. Brazier up considerably. She had become anxious about the correspondence arriving at her address and wanted the matter resolved. Indeed, some of the correspondence, to which I shall turn shortly, was quite threatening in tone and was causing her considerable anxiety. She was therefore much happier when the CAB said that it had spoken to Thames Credit and that the letters would stop coming as a result. But the letters did not stop coming; they continued to arrive and, in fact, became rather more aggressive, referring to field agents arriving at her home unannounced. That led Mrs. Brazier to lock herself in, even when with family members.
On 3 April, after another letter had been received, Mrs. Brazier telephoned Thames Credit and said that she had lived in her home for two years and did not know Mr. Noorullah. However, she had been receiving letters to him and felt that she should make a payment. She would send £600. In spite of the fact that she said otherwise, the negotiator apparently assumed that she did know Mr. Noorullah. A payment of £500 was duly received by Thames Credit and banked. The cheque was accompanied by a note, clearly from Mrs. Brazier, saying that she would forward £50 a week towards the debt. Her life savings before that withdrawal were around £1,000, so she had withdrawn half her life savings to make payments towards a debt incurred by another.
On 6 April, Mrs. Brazier's body was found in a local pond. Further letters then arrived at her address and were of course found by her family members, including one that asserted:
"through public databases it has been confirmed that Mr. Noorullah is living at the address shown on this letter".
There was also a letter to Mr. Noorullah that acknowledged receipt of the £500, but which made no reference to Mrs. Brazier's having been the agent of the payment.
An inquest was held into Mrs. Brazier's death, the main hearing being in September 2007. Attending were representatives of all the companies involved, except for Aktiv Kapital and Thames Credit. The companies attending were cross-examined, and in an adjournment the deputy coroner conducting the inquest expressed the view that Thames Credit should have been asked to attend, to answer questions on its role. He felt that that was the right thing to do, bearing in mind the direction in which the evidence was turning in the inquest. The family, perfectly understandably, declined an adjournment. They were anxious to bring the terrible episode to an end and bring closure to an appalling experience.
I have a number of concerns and queries about what happened. First, I accept that companies involved in the business of collecting debt have to deal with people who may attempt to deceive and mislead, and that mechanisms that assume the integrity of those sought are probably unrealistic. However, this case highlights how reasonable approaches to handling data, maintaining its quality, verifying information and dealing with potentially vulnerable people are readily neglected. In several areas, companies involved in the case appear to have followed neither the voluntary code of their own industry nor the Office of Fair Trading guidance.
First, let me turn to the guidance given by the Credit Services Association, the industry's own body. It says, first, that a member should
"take all possible steps to verify that the person being pursued is in fact the debtor".
Thames Credit appears to have used Experian data carrying a "Gone away" marker, unless it is claimed that that information was not passed on by Experian, in which case Experian are partly at fault. However, Experian's terms and conditions in selling data to a third party make it clear that the data offered is
"not intended to be used as the sole basis for any business decision",
and the client—in this case, Thames Credit—agrees to take reasonable steps to confirm the identity of a debtor before taking any action to recover the relevant debt where a home address has not been provided. In Thames Credit's submission to the coroner, it indicates no use of any other source than Experian, and it asserts through its solicitor that
"the overall accuracy of such data-matching is in the region of 98 per cent. and therefore high".
However, that is not the view of people working in the industry, who regard Experian as providing data that is a first point of call for someone seeking to trace a debtor, and not as a desperately reliable source of where that person is.
As my story reveals, it had already been identified that Mr. Noorullah no longer lived at that address, if he ever had—and of course he had not. Indeed, one source from the industry has told me that reckless use of unverified and completely incorrect address information by debt collection agencies is widespread. If so, this terrible case with a tragedy attached to it is merely the most extreme end of a spectrum of practices that are no doubt going on in many Members' constituencies.
Secondly, a member
"should offer maximum co-operation with the debtor's nominated or chosen third party".
If the CAB did indeed contact Thames Credit, then that obligation was not complied with. Among the OFT's examples of unfair practice are
"not ceasing collection activities whilst investigating a reasonably queried or disputed debt."
In this case, mail was returned. It is appropriate to contrast the actions taken by GE Capital and by Thames Credit. GE Capital immediately referred the doubt back to the agent who supplied the data, who regrettably did not check their source. It seems that they ceased mailing to this address and flagged the Experian file as "Gone away". Thames Credit appears to have carried on regardless, despite returned mail and a phone call from Mrs. Brazier in which she made it clear that Mr. Noorullah did not live at her address and was unknown to her. It is also possible that it received a call from CAB. These actions were based, it seems, on one piece of data which was at best dubious.
The OFT also makes it clear that
"threatening to visit debtors without prior agreement",
which happened in this case, is an unfair practice when a debt is disputed. Correspondence from Thames Credit includes just such a threat. The letter with Mrs. Brazier's handwriting on it demanding £15,670.70 threatened that should Mr. Noorullah—of course, all the letters were addressed to him—not contact the company within 14 days, field agents would call at her address to discuss repayment. I am afraid that to a 61-year-old lady that sounds like a pretty heavy threat. At that point, she called the company and spoke to it, but not much good did it do.
One must also ask whether the negotiator involved at Thames Credit behaved reasonably. From Thames Credit's own account, Mrs. Brazier made it clear that she did not know the man in question and that he did not live at her address—yet she was offering a large payment. Surely that should have triggered concern that the company was dealing with an anxious and confused person—but the payment was banked and the correspondence continued to come.
It should be the case, where an address is queried and it has been provided by a third party—in this case, DataTrace—that at the very least, as part of the quality control in the contract, the doubt should be referred back to the source. That was not done by Westcot earlier in the saga. Had that happened, the subsequent mismanagement of erroneous data would have been irrelevant.
This has been a grim story, and a terrible experience Mrs. Brazier's family. They wish me to ensure that, as far as possible, such an experience should never be repeated. I share that wish. From my understanding of the issues in the case, the Office of Fair Trading should review the performance of the companies involved and their compliance with its code. The Information Commissioner should also examine their data management practices. The industry body may also wish to consider the compliance with its code in this case. The family and I stand ready to assist in all those matters, and I look forward to the Minister's reply.
Mark Todd, MP South Derbyshire, house of commons debate, 18th December 2007
This brief debate will focus on a tragic death, one critical error and a series of other errors and misjudgments that contributed to a lady's death. I speak of Mrs. Beryl Brazier, who lived in my constituency for some considerable time. She moved house, and I will deal with the implications of her doing so.
Let me go through the sequence of events. Mrs. Brazier opened a credit account with GE Capital bank in 1998. She managed it perfectly well until she moved house in 2005, when she had arrears of about £500. She did not move far—just to another home in the Swadlincote urban area. GE Capital sought to trace her, using a tracing company, Westcot credit services, which subcontracted the task to another company, DataTrace. That company successfully traced her and spoke to her on the phone. She was perfectly amicable and provided all the details requested.
At the same time, the company was tracing a number of other debtors, including a Mr. Noorullah, but it failed to provide a tracing address for him. In preparing the tracing report going back to Westcot credit services, it used a formatted document in which Mr. Noorullah's and Mrs. Brazier's data, which included her telephone number, were transposed. Thus Mr. Noorullah was reported as living at Mrs. Brazier's address. GE Capital reported this address for Mr. Noorullah to Experian, the national credit reference agency, as a live address. It continued to pursue Mr. Noorullah's address, because it had a debt to recover from him as well. The letter was returned. The address was queried with Westcot, but Westcot did not pass the query back to the originator of the research, DataTrace, and there is no record of exactly how it attempted to check the address. It seems unlikely that the phone contact provided was actually used.
Westcot reported back to GE Capital that Mr. Noorullah was no longer at that address; it provided no more information than that. Curiously enough, and possibly because there is no evidence that Mrs. Brazier was anything other than an honest woman and may have provided forwarding information, GE Capital had by then received notification of Mrs. Brazier's correct address, which was held on the system. GE Capital then updated the Experian database for Mr. Noorullah with a "Gone away" marker, indicating that that address was unreliable. It then decided for its own business reasons to sell on Mr. Noorullah's debt to a company called Aktiv Kapital, which contracted another company, Thames Credit, to purse the debt. For reasons that are not entirely clear, although GE Capital now knew Mrs. Brazier's correct address, it seemed not to have pursued her for her own debt.
It appears that Thames Credit sourced the address for Mr. Noorullah from Experian. That should have meant that the address provided was indicated as not being reliable; as I have explained, it would have had a "Gone away" marker on it. Thames Credit or Aktiv Kapital appear to have held other debts for Mr. Noorullah, which were combined with the one owed to GE Capital to produce a sum in excess of £15,000. Letters addressed to Mr. Noorullah were sent to Mrs. Brazier's address. They were initially returned, just as earlier correspondence from GE Capital was returned as "Not known at this address", as hon. Members will recall. However, they continued to arrive.
Mrs. Brazier then visited the local citizens advice bureau in Swadlincote, on 23 February 2006, with a family member. The CAB asserts that it rang Thames Credit to say that Mr. Noorullah did not live at Mrs. Brazier's address. Although the CAB has provided convincing detail of the call, describing the person answering it and the conversation that followed, Thames Credit claims to have no record of such a call.
Mrs. Brazier's daughter reported that the visit to the citizens advice bureau had cheered Mrs. Brazier up considerably. She had become anxious about the correspondence arriving at her address and wanted the matter resolved. Indeed, some of the correspondence, to which I shall turn shortly, was quite threatening in tone and was causing her considerable anxiety. She was therefore much happier when the CAB said that it had spoken to Thames Credit and that the letters would stop coming as a result. But the letters did not stop coming; they continued to arrive and, in fact, became rather more aggressive, referring to field agents arriving at her home unannounced. That led Mrs. Brazier to lock herself in, even when with family members.
On 3 April, after another letter had been received, Mrs. Brazier telephoned Thames Credit and said that she had lived in her home for two years and did not know Mr. Noorullah. However, she had been receiving letters to him and felt that she should make a payment. She would send £600. In spite of the fact that she said otherwise, the negotiator apparently assumed that she did know Mr. Noorullah. A payment of £500 was duly received by Thames Credit and banked. The cheque was accompanied by a note, clearly from Mrs. Brazier, saying that she would forward £50 a week towards the debt. Her life savings before that withdrawal were around £1,000, so she had withdrawn half her life savings to make payments towards a debt incurred by another.
On 6 April, Mrs. Brazier's body was found in a local pond. Further letters then arrived at her address and were of course found by her family members, including one that asserted:
"through public databases it has been confirmed that Mr. Noorullah is living at the address shown on this letter".
There was also a letter to Mr. Noorullah that acknowledged receipt of the £500, but which made no reference to Mrs. Brazier's having been the agent of the payment.
An inquest was held into Mrs. Brazier's death, the main hearing being in September 2007. Attending were representatives of all the companies involved, except for Aktiv Kapital and Thames Credit. The companies attending were cross-examined, and in an adjournment the deputy coroner conducting the inquest expressed the view that Thames Credit should have been asked to attend, to answer questions on its role. He felt that that was the right thing to do, bearing in mind the direction in which the evidence was turning in the inquest. The family, perfectly understandably, declined an adjournment. They were anxious to bring the terrible episode to an end and bring closure to an appalling experience.
I have a number of concerns and queries about what happened. First, I accept that companies involved in the business of collecting debt have to deal with people who may attempt to deceive and mislead, and that mechanisms that assume the integrity of those sought are probably unrealistic. However, this case highlights how reasonable approaches to handling data, maintaining its quality, verifying information and dealing with potentially vulnerable people are readily neglected. In several areas, companies involved in the case appear to have followed neither the voluntary code of their own industry nor the Office of Fair Trading guidance.
First, let me turn to the guidance given by the Credit Services Association, the industry's own body. It says, first, that a member should
"take all possible steps to verify that the person being pursued is in fact the debtor".
Thames Credit appears to have used Experian data carrying a "Gone away" marker, unless it is claimed that that information was not passed on by Experian, in which case Experian are partly at fault. However, Experian's terms and conditions in selling data to a third party make it clear that the data offered is
"not intended to be used as the sole basis for any business decision",
and the client—in this case, Thames Credit—agrees to take reasonable steps to confirm the identity of a debtor before taking any action to recover the relevant debt where a home address has not been provided. In Thames Credit's submission to the coroner, it indicates no use of any other source than Experian, and it asserts through its solicitor that
"the overall accuracy of such data-matching is in the region of 98 per cent. and therefore high".
However, that is not the view of people working in the industry, who regard Experian as providing data that is a first point of call for someone seeking to trace a debtor, and not as a desperately reliable source of where that person is.
As my story reveals, it had already been identified that Mr. Noorullah no longer lived at that address, if he ever had—and of course he had not. Indeed, one source from the industry has told me that reckless use of unverified and completely incorrect address information by debt collection agencies is widespread. If so, this terrible case with a tragedy attached to it is merely the most extreme end of a spectrum of practices that are no doubt going on in many Members' constituencies.
Secondly, a member
"should offer maximum co-operation with the debtor's nominated or chosen third party".
If the CAB did indeed contact Thames Credit, then that obligation was not complied with. Among the OFT's examples of unfair practice are
"not ceasing collection activities whilst investigating a reasonably queried or disputed debt."
In this case, mail was returned. It is appropriate to contrast the actions taken by GE Capital and by Thames Credit. GE Capital immediately referred the doubt back to the agent who supplied the data, who regrettably did not check their source. It seems that they ceased mailing to this address and flagged the Experian file as "Gone away". Thames Credit appears to have carried on regardless, despite returned mail and a phone call from Mrs. Brazier in which she made it clear that Mr. Noorullah did not live at her address and was unknown to her. It is also possible that it received a call from CAB. These actions were based, it seems, on one piece of data which was at best dubious.
The OFT also makes it clear that
"threatening to visit debtors without prior agreement",
which happened in this case, is an unfair practice when a debt is disputed. Correspondence from Thames Credit includes just such a threat. The letter with Mrs. Brazier's handwriting on it demanding £15,670.70 threatened that should Mr. Noorullah—of course, all the letters were addressed to him—not contact the company within 14 days, field agents would call at her address to discuss repayment. I am afraid that to a 61-year-old lady that sounds like a pretty heavy threat. At that point, she called the company and spoke to it, but not much good did it do.
One must also ask whether the negotiator involved at Thames Credit behaved reasonably. From Thames Credit's own account, Mrs. Brazier made it clear that she did not know the man in question and that he did not live at her address—yet she was offering a large payment. Surely that should have triggered concern that the company was dealing with an anxious and confused person—but the payment was banked and the correspondence continued to come.
It should be the case, where an address is queried and it has been provided by a third party—in this case, DataTrace—that at the very least, as part of the quality control in the contract, the doubt should be referred back to the source. That was not done by Westcot earlier in the saga. Had that happened, the subsequent mismanagement of erroneous data would have been irrelevant.
This has been a grim story, and a terrible experience Mrs. Brazier's family. They wish me to ensure that, as far as possible, such an experience should never be repeated. I share that wish. From my understanding of the issues in the case, the Office of Fair Trading should review the performance of the companies involved and their compliance with its code. The Information Commissioner should also examine their data management practices. The industry body may also wish to consider the compliance with its code in this case. The family and I stand ready to assist in all those matters, and I look forward to the Minister's reply.