Attempted Fraud by Age UK?

Age UK used to be a charity. Used to be.  

Now only the London headquarters is a charitable organisation that gives help, guidance and suchlike to the elderly.

Like so many other organisations over the last forty years or so Age UK have given away much of their power to businesses seeking predominantly profit. This has led to significant injustice for many as services become harder to access. The example given below is a good illustration of how far things have fallen.

The social care crisis has enabled some unscrupulous activity in the care sector. As employees become harder to find firms need to be more creative about ensuring their sources of income. Some are a little too creative!

Therefore if you have an Age UK local office it is more likely this is a business run for profit as a limited company with Directors and suchlike. But they will trade with the Age UK logo and name which still makes the public think of it as a charity and not a business.

You can of course look up your local Age UK office on the Companies House website, it will be styled as Age UK Stevenage, or Age UK Bolton and so on to distinguish it from the charity and the multiple other for-profit bodies run under the same title. This will provide a list of the local Directors of the business and other useful data.

This is of course fundamentally dishonest and close to misrepresentation. It is not however the most dishonest thing about these companies which use the Age UK name, as this article will show. 

My mother is elderly, housebound and has severe medical needs. Care needs to be provided for her and we used our local Age UK for this for a period of six months or so. The service provided was… adequate. But not spectacular.

This was for home care in which carers would attend twice a day to empty commodes, make her food etc. This was of course in addition to family attending to her on a daily basis also.

The Age UK visits were to “top up” the care already being provided by relatives.

As the service levels were not especially wonderful we said goodbye to Age UK after a time. Less impressive than anything they did to care for my mother was the tendency for workers to sit around for ten minutes in a half hour appointment after all the essential jobs were done.  

All payments to the local Age UK were of course up to date and bills were settled in good time. However when we said we no longer required their services two additional bills arrived which were over and above the work already paid for. These bills amounted in total to around £1,200 being requested when clearly all the due invoices had been settled and no additional work had been carried out. This was queried by me with the office who were adamant that the invoices represented monies due.

The local branch continued to press for payment of sums not owed. They even claimed in a letter to me that they were a charitable organisation and this is the reason the invoices should be paid, which I was able to quickly disprove by a check on Companies House, as I described above.

Eventually the matter was taken up by the firm as a civil action with my mother named as the Defendant and Age UK’s local business as the Claimant.

And this is where things start to get interesting and murkier still.

An initial hearing was due to take place in the matter in August 2021. Directions were issued by the Court that Age UK failed to comply with, in other words they failed to supply evidence, documents, a Statement and so on to the Court. The hearing was by telephone. No-one from Age UK took part in the hearing and the Court’s efforts to contact the Claimant by phone for the hearing failed. 

As a result of this the Claim was struck out by the District Judge. 

However Age UK applied to resume the claim and a further hearing date was set for September 2021. Age UK’s application for the case to be re-heard sounded impressive and worrying: in short if you believed what was written in the Application the business was tottering on the edge of bankruptcy due to the non-payment of these supposed sums owed.

Again prior to the hearing in September 2021 Age UK had failed to enter any Statement and failed to comply with the directions of the Court. The fact that on the second go around they were still failing to produce any evidence showing that any sums were owed is telling: the claim was an abuse of process to try to obtain payments Age UK were aware were not owed, and the misuse of the civil system was to make my mother fearful of the proceedings such that she paid up to stop them.

What’s more a day before the hearing they issued a Notice of Discontinuance to stop all proceedings, recognising that severe costs would be awarded against them for their vexatious misuse of the civil court system.

And vexatious misuse is exactly what the local branch of Age UK tried.

They had no intention to go forward to a hearing with this matter but rather by the threat and then the issue of civil proceedings they sought to frighten an elderly lady in ill-health into paying sums they were fully aware were not owed.

Nor do I think my mother is the only elderly person or their family that businesses operating under the Age UK title have tried this sort of thing with: its a nice little earner when a client says goodbye to try squeezing them for funds one last time. Perhaps this is common practice in the care sector?

Had my mother not been so frail that she pushed all financial matters to family to sort out she would likely have seen those final two duplicitous invoices and paid them without thinking.

In any event she would likely have paid the sums they claim were owed at the threat of Court action. And she would certainly have paid them at the receipt of papers from the Court. In this way Age UK sought to misuse the civil court system to obtain around £1,200 they were not owed from a vulnerable elderly lady.

In a way the most disturbing thing about this is that no evidence was laid before the Court to show the sums were due. Even when their case was struck out Age UK considered it worth a punt to apply to re-start the case on the off chance this forced a payment from fear of proceedings without them having to show evidence of it being due.  

However we kept our nerve and called their bluff right up until the second hearing, just before which they folded.

Does this not raise some interesting questions?

That the charity based in London’s good name is being abused by organisations focused totally on profit, often by underhanded means. I am certain that there will be some financial kickback to the charity for this in the form of a ongoing licence to private businesses to use the name.

More to the point that the businesses who licence the name Age UK are at least partly presenting themselves as charities and not businesses.

Finally of course are the actions of the local office which are clearly bringing themselves and the charity into disrepute.

This is very much the way in modern Britain: rapacious companies prey upon the vulnerable, use intimidation and misuse the law to try to enrich themselves.