You and Yours

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You and Yours: Cladding, Mobile phones, RAC.

19/08/2019

Cladding, Mobile phones, RAC.

BBC Radio 4 - You and Yours, Cladding, Mobile phones, RAC.

Olympic Park cladding. Mobile phone contracts. Complaints about roadside recovery.

The hundreds of people still waiting to discover if cladding on their buildings is safe.
Interview with the boss of Giffgaff.
More complaints from people about the RAC.

Our reporter, Melanie Abbott, is live from Olympic Park where hundreds of people are still waiting to find out if the cladding on their buildings is safe. Those living in flats on the Olympic Park, built as part of the legacy from the 2012 Games, say their freeholder is delaying the tests. They've now been waiting more than eight months for tests to get underway. In the meantime, sales of some flats are falling through because mortgage companies are asking for certificates which confirm that the cladding is fireproof.

We report on the smaller companies taking on Britain's big four mobile providers - Vodafone, EE, O2 and Three. These rivals don't build or maintain their own networks. Instead they piggyback on the companies that do, offering cheap, simple flexible rolling contracts that can be stopped or changed at any time. We speak to Ashley Schofield, the chief executive of Giffgaff, which uses the O2 network, about how companies like his can keep competing with the big four networks now that they're fighting back against their smaller rivals with better deals for customers.

This time last year, we heard lots of horror stories from people who'd been left stranded at the roadside, waiting for RAC patrols to turn up. The RAC told us they were going to expand their patrols. They promised there'd be shorter waiting times and better communication in future. But we're still getting complaints from listeners. We hear from a woman who says the RAC took 16 hours to get her home after her car broke down. We also speak to Martyn James from the consumer website, Resolver, where complaints about RAC breakdown call-outs have almost doubled in the last year. 

Presenter: Winifred Robinson
Producer: Tara Holmes

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