Anglian Gold Account www.anglianhome.co.uk

I was employed by Anglian for about 3 months in 2012. From start to finish it was an unpleasant experience and I was particularly shocked at the way paying customers were treated. I thought I should put my experience in writing in the hope that people will avoid this company. I worked at the Fareham Installation Depot which at the time was run by Ken Jones and Martin Pike.

Anglian does not use its own staff; the fittings are sub-contracted to self-employed glaziers and window fitters. As the sub-contractor pay was so poor at Fareham keeping fitters on the payroll was a constant problem. I can remember several occasions when we had to cancel installations on the day because a disgruntled fitter was holding his company owned van to ransom to make sure he was paid!

Whilst I worked for Anglian a new batch of fitters were recruited and trained. The training lasted three days after which the installers were let loose on people’s homes. At the end of the three days there was a test. This shouldn’t provide much reassurance as a member of the admin staff at the depot, with no practical experience actually sat the test and passed!

Sharp sales practices were in evidence from the start. Be warned; once Anglian have your deposit and a contract signed from a customer service perspective you are on a slippery slope and your right to cancel is non-existent. One particularly bad case sticks in my memory. Anglian targets the elderly for their sales. I can remember Martin Pike shouting down the phone at a CAB representative because citizen’s advice was going to the local papers over a contract Anglian refused to cancel. The old lady who had signed the contract had no recollection of doing so because she had dementia.

If you survive the contract process and are lucky enough to have windows fitted by someone with more than about a week’s experience then you best hope that the install is got right first time. Once Anglian have the balance from you and have pulled off site, that’s it, you’re on your own. Any follow up visit that an installer needed to make was known as a service call. Extreme cases included an eighty year old whose patio doors wouldn’t lock and another elderly gentleman who was left with no lining for his felt roof during two weeks of heavy weather. As far as I know his porch was ruined. Just in case you were wondering, Anglian doesn’t do refunds or compensation. The installers don’t want to do the service calls as no fee is involved.

In the weeks before I left things got really bad. Of the fitters we trained, all the good ones left after about a week. This meant the revenue from the installs dropped dramatically as the remaining fitters either overran or the customer refused to pay because the job was incomplete or bodged. Anglian’s answer? Ken Jones, under pressure from a senior manager cancelled all service calls indefinitely so fitters could start new jobs. So, if you had a problem the admin staff would book you an appointment, you would sit in all day waiting but the admin knew no one would be coming out to you.

A similar situation used to occur if the customer was just a one window job. If it represented low value to Anglian, it would get axed until a time that was more convenient to them. If you were going to get chopped we would normally tell you on the day.

My last day was another which is etched in my memory. Nights were beginning to get colder and installers who had been with us for about two weeks were on a site near Southsea. The customer was a widower in his eighties and for various reasons struggled with communication. For this reason it will come as no surprise that we managed to sell this poor individual £8000 worth of windows and doors. The installers wanted to get off site as they were moving to a different employer and this was their last job. We left that poor old man without a door for the night!

Reading this back I am ashamed that I have not spoken up sooner. In fairness there were one of two good installer teams at Fareham and Fareham was just one depot. It was the management there who had the most to answer for; they cared about nothing beyond their bottom line. I hope that someone will read this and based on its content will decide not to give Anglian their hard earned money

I just had a window installation on Friday 13th September. The installation team removed the old window from kitchen & when tried to fit the new window the frame was too big to fit, which left my kitchen boarded up for few days. They should have brought the correct size windows and measured second time before removing the old windows. I was promised that board will be removed in 4 days and correct window will be installed. They finally installed the window after 4 days of living in boarded up kitchen, but this time they brought the wrong side opening window. Next day their supervisor from Stockport office came after 7.5 hours wait as he promised to arrive in morning. He accepted the faults and also inspected the damage done to the kitchen tiles. He said he will come back and it's 10 days since his visit no one has come back. I have spoken to one of the lady in Stockport customer service, who I have spoken to several times and asked to take my formal complaint but her customer service is appalling. I think their whole team & company culture is shocking. Can someone advise me what legal action I can take against them if they mess me around. I signed up for gold account, can they get them money without me signing off.

I just bought my windows from Anglian and i took the gold account and it is awesome. I have sold finance packages in the past and this is by far the best I have ever seen. You initially get 10% discount for taking it as this comes from Barclays as an incentive to use their product on mine it worked out at £1200. The loan was spread over a max of 10 years but with absolutely no restrictions for early settlement or over payment,meaning that if i cleared it in 2.2 years, it would work out that i had paid no interest on the cash price. By clearing it in a year and a half it makes it cheaper than buying cash and taking an interest free loan!!

the APR is 22.9% but the interest is 1.69%, for those who don't know the difference, the APR is the total amount payable, if you defaulted on every payment for the year and got charged for every default, that would be the rate that you pay back. The interest rate is actually how the interest is calculated so that is the only figure worth looking at. the interest is calculated monthly on the remaining balance so it prevents front loading interest. So anyone who thinks they can get a better deal by paying cash or borrowing money or going interest free and not using this is mad. Sit down and read through the terms and conditions properly! THIS IS CHEAPER THAN INTEREST FREE IF YOU SETTLE EARLY!!

We had someone from Anglian knock at our door and offer us a free quote for double glazing. As we are intending to have this done next year when an endowment policy matures we said we would be interested in a quote then but they said they could give a quote which would be valid for 12 months so we arranged an appointment. This turned into a three hour hard sell and they wanted us to sign up for the Anglian Gold Account and have it done immediately. The representative claimed that Anglian would receive a £2,500 commission from Barclays which he would pass straight on to us - I would be interested to know what his sales pitch would have been if we wanted to pay cash then. The interest rate is 22.9% so on a £10,000 loan well over £2,000 a year. You can get a personal loan between 7 and 8% so my advice would be not to touch this product with a barge pole. I would like to give no stars but that doesn't seem to be possible.

Second time that I have used Anglian Home Improvement The first time I was unable to find a better deal overall. The second time I didn't even bother looking.