Your problems: Delayed for an hour – then denied a refund

I booked two train tickets via the LNER website for travel on 16 June from London King’s Cross to Scarborough. To keep costs down (£57 total, including a senior railcard discount), the journey involved two changes and three operators: LNER, Northern and TransPennine Express.

The second leg of the journey, the Northern service from Leeds to York, arrived at 4.11pm instead of the scheduled 3.58pm. That delay meant we missed our onward TPE connection to Scarborough, which departed York at 4.10pm, just one minute before we arrived. We were forced to wait an hour for the next train, eventually reaching Scarborough at 6.01pm, more than an hour later than scheduled.

I submitted a delay repay claim to Northern, which was rejected on the basis that the “overall delay was less than 15 minutes”. I discovered that under the National Rail conditions of travel, compensation is based on arrival time at the final destination of a valid through ticket – not just the leg that was delayed.

I appealed, but was turned down again. This time I was told that Northern could not “find a timetabled journey that matches the claim”. This despite my having provided details from the LNER booking, including the full itinerary and tickets. Northern appears to be ignoring the published rules on through-ticket delay compensation, and makes it unnecessarily difficult to appeal. I hope highlighting this will help prevent other passengers being fobbed off in the same way. I’d also like my money back.

Delay repay is a nationwide scheme that should make it easier for you to get compensation for delayed journeys. You are quite right that the rules of the scheme stipulate that compensation should be based on the length of delay on arrival at the final destination, not any delay during the journey. As your one-way journey was delayed by more than one hour, you were entitled to a full refund.

I asked Northern to look at your claim again and this time it conceded that it had made a mistake. It told you that your claim had initially been rejected because there are multiple operators running services between Leeds and York, and the delay repay system mistakenly identified a TransPennine Express train that ran on time, rather than the delayed 15.30 Northern service for which your ticket was valid.

Alex Hornby, the commercial and customer director for Northern, said: “I’d like to apologise to our customer for her experience here. The team in our local customer experience centre work incredibly hard behind the scenes to provide the best possible service for our customers, though mistakes can happen and did on this occasion. I’m only sorry this one was not picked up sooner.”

It has refunded the £57 to you.

My husband has an account with British Gas and it incorrectly reported a default on his account. The company admitted this was an error and said, more than a year ago, that it would be removed.

Now he’s trying to get a mortgage and the bank won’t lend, due to the default. He has been chasing for a week now. At first they said they’d remove the default, email confirmation and write a letter for our lender. But it’s a week later and this hasn’t happened. We have a 28-day deadline to submit the mortgage application, otherwise our property gets released.

After your husband spent eight hours on the phone to British Gas, it sent him an email saying: “This serves as confirmation that the misunderstanding regarding the marker on your credit profile has been cleared and is in the process of being removed from our end”.

Your mortgage broker said this was not enough to prove that your husband had not defaulted on a payment, so I asked British Gas to update your husband’s credit record immediately and send him a clear letter to that effect. The next day you said: “We have received a very detailed email from the British Gas executive office confirming that you’ve been in touch and that the markers on the credit report are errors that will be removed. They have finally provided enough for our mortgage to be approved and we have been able to reserve our home.”

Email your problems to Jill Insley at your.problems@observer.co.uk