Dear LPG,

I hope that writing this piece of information down will serve as a message which readers can pass onto their children or younger friends who find themselves with a similar problem to the one my friend found herself with recently.

She would have now been a pensioner if not for the fact that the government changed the rules about the age that you can become one. Eight years ago her husband’s dementia got worse and her work absence record suffered to the point where she left and decided to become his full time carer.

Last year, the inevitable happened and she now finds herself alone, separated from the few family members that she has left and with five years to go before she officially becomes a pensioner.  She also finds herself on universal credit, with her own heart-related health issues and locked down with little hope of getting a new job in the Covid-19 climate that we are all still living through.

Bereavement and ill health is enough to send anyone into a mental state of vacuum and it is so much easier if you can find someone who is close enough to see the whole situation objectively to help with all the paperwork at a time like this. 

Sorting out her Gas, Electricity, water and rent bills were fairly strait forward but she had entered into a relatively large Virgin telephone contract which she was not going to be able to afford.  We have all heard that saying, ‘a contract is a contract’ and even if you change your mind half way through I always thought that you would be expected to honour a contract and pay the balance and I could not see how she was going to manage that. 

In the end we called them and learned that, in such circumstances, they will radically reduce such contracts, leaving just telephone and broadband rather than cause their clients more problems. We worked out too late that it is not mandatory to manage your benefits online, but the government will trap you into it if they can. The good thing is that the telephone companies appear to understand that the internet is not a luxury any more.

I know that such situations don’t often affect us older people so much, but I also know that more and more of our younger relatives and friends are getting trapped by this aspect of pandemic fall-out and I hope that readers will pass on this information where it might help.

EC, Forest Hill.

LPG found a bit of information…

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