Arvinder Singh Gill of Newbridge Crescent, Wolverhampton, who trades as Autodesign and Auto Elite, found himself before Dudley magistrates in September 2015.  Gill admitted misleading a car buyer about the mileage of a BMW 316 which was advertised as 75,000 miles when in fact the vehicle had done 133,000 miles.

The new owner started to have problems with the car and decided to carry out his own checks which revealed a number of issues, so the owner complained to trading standards.

Major Changes in Consumer Law

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 (the “CRA”) will come into force on 1st October 2015, it will introduce changes in the UK to contracts entered into by traders and consumers for the supply of goods, services and/or digital content.

These changes will apply to contracts entered into after 1st October.

The new rules will apply to your business if:

• You are a trader;
• Who enters into contracts for the supply of goods, digital content or services (or any combination of these);
• With consumers.

We have a problem which you may be able to help with.

We repaired a car for a customer and at handover told the customer that our repair is covered by a warranty, there is nothing in writing we just provide a warranty. All the insurers we work with say that we must give a warranty so we do.

The customer has returned 3 months after we handed the car back and has given us an invoice from another bodyshop for ‘rectifying’ our work. The customer has asked to claim it ‘on the warranty’.  The customer did not complain or contact us before the work was completed and we were not given a chance to rectify the problem.

What can we do?

We repair crash damaged vehicles and have an issue with one engineer in particular who constantly wants a 10% discount off the estimate. We spend time producing a professional estimate by appropriately qualified estimators and have invested in the latest and quite expensive estimating equipment. We are approved by a number of manufacturers and our estimators are constantly being trained on new model requirements.

The fact that this engineer always wants 10% off originally was amusing but after many months I am finding it increasingly annoying. It has been suggested that we just increase our estimate by 10% to allow the engineer to then deduct his 10% but I don’t like to ‘massage the figures’.

I don’t think what the engineer is doing is appropriate but not sure how to deal with this problem, I wonder whether I am the only repairer that is treated this way, what do you suggest?