BUREAUCRACY AND BILLS

 

The château at Fougères-sur-Bièvres.

My dad is settled into his sheltered housing and doing well.  We have completed the sale of his bungalow and re-homed most of his unwanted belongings, one way or another.  There were inevitably a few trips to the tip but very little that was vaguely useful was thrown out.  The local hospice charity shop had first pick of the furniture and with my limited computer skills I successfully used social media as a way of re-homing stuff.  We sold furniture, record players, computer screens, drawing equipment and even the piano that way.  Much, much better than simply paying a huge amount of money to someone to take it all away, although it was, without doubt, a lot of work.  The trick is to make things very cheap to ensure a lot of interest and a quick sale.

Of course, that's not the end of the story.  As always, after selling a house there is a good deal of paperwork to do, cancelling accounts for utilities, insurance, and so on.  We have spent hours, days even, on the phone or in front of the computer trying to get various companies to answer our calls and emails.  What an uphill struggle that is.  These companies are so keen to assure us of giving their best possible service during these "difficult times" but the service is in fact often dire.  After a good deal of persistence most of it is now done.

We do however, have a problem with the council.  They send out a tsunami of printed material to his flat every week.  Most of it is statements regarding his rent and other services.  Occasionally there is actually an invoice that needs paying but poor old Dad, who now can't see well enough to read them properly, thinks everything is a bill.   He's of the generation that is desperately keen not to have any unpaid bills or debts against his name and would be sending cheques off in response to every letter if we didn't intervene.  So far this week he has phoned us four times straight after the visit from the postman to say another bill has arrived.  Out of the five letters this week only one was something that needed to be paid.

The council's bill for all this postage and labour must be huge!  There is an enormous amount of duplication of material.  I expect there are legal reasons why they have to keep tenants infinitely informed but there must be a better way.  We have requested that post be sent to us instead as we have LPoA , and that direct debits be set up for most of it, but so far those requests have fallen unnoticed into the depths of the slowly grinding local authority machine!  We are making very slow progress!