Title: Staff of British bank, Halifax, verbally abuse an autistic customer.

Source: British autistic woman

Date received:  May 2021

Details: 

A British plumber had carried out some work on a household and left them without a working water supply. After a number of visits, the plumber failed to resolve the problem and then became impossible to contact. The householders contacted Halifax to withdraw payment for the work.

After some communications back and forth, Halifax allowed the payment to continue to be made because the plumber claimed he was going to fix the problem, but at no time did he make any effort to do this and he refused to return to the property until the regulators “GasSafe” forced him to do so under threat of losing his certification.

The household was still left without a working water supply as the regulator only assures compliance with safety regulations and does not become involved with quality of work beyond those regulations. Halifax refused to change their stance although no attempts to fix the problem were being made by the plumber. During the conversation, a staff member named Irfaf, who apparently was a manager on the service desk in question, began to interact very differently with a member of the household when she explained that she is autistic and needed him to speak fairly slowly and give her sufficient time to reply. Comments made included:

“You aren’t able to grasp what I am telling you,” when the woman understood perfectly clearly what was being said, but contested that it was wrong as the plumber was refusing to attend to fix the problem.

“No, listen, listen, listen,” was said a number of times although the staff member, Irfaf, was only repeating the same thing again and again.

“I don’t want to talk to you. Let me talk to someone else,” after the autistic woman’s father had to stop talking to the Halifax staff because they were being rude and refused to listen. There was nobody else to deal with the issue and simply leaving it, with a large payment being made for work not carried out, was not a reasonable thing to do.

The woman is confident that the manner of the Halifax staff changed immediately when they were told she is autistic.

Ultimately, the woman made a complaint to the body that regulates Halifax and full payment was returned to the account. She is not certain if the plumber still received payment or not, and found that trading standards were not of very much help as they only record complaints until a sufficient number of them have been received.

The woman who dealt with the case for the regulators was very sympathetic and apologised that she could not help to take direct action against the plumbers. Halifax’s policy, as she was told by other members of staff over time, is that if a tradesman claims they will return to resolve a fault then payment cannot be withheld. There is no attempt to verify whether or not the fault is ever resolved. It turned out that some minor changes had to be made to the household pipework to solve the problem, which should have been well within the area of responsibility of the plumber as he had been under contract to that household for well over a decade, but Halifax did not care about any of this, and as recorded, became abusive when the woman tried to explain the situation.

A complaint was made to Halifax about the abusive behaviour of their staff but nobody ever contacted the woman about it, and once the problem was resolved she didn’t want to pursue the complaint as she just wanted to forget about the horrible experience. Of course, Halifax does make many claims about anti-discrimination compliance but in this case, were not interested in taking any action or even comment on the abusive and discriminatory way their staff dealt with an autistic customer.