Large organisation 'accidentally' paid me 100s of ££ and want it back. Do I have to repay it?

[southparkhamster]

NC for this.

I moved out of a rented house recently. In the course of cleaning it and making it nice, I used a product which made it look worse (being deliberately vague so as not to be outing). I complained to the manufacturer and said that because of their product I might lose my security deposit. I asked the company to pay to have it put right. There was a lot of emailing and a lot of stress (for me). They didn't tell me that they would put it right, instead they asked to deal directly with the landlord, so I put them in touch.

Next thing I know, I receive a cheque from the company for several hundred pounds. It came with a letter that said something along the lines of 'we hope this restores your faith in our company'. The letter said nothing about what the cheque was for - specifically, it did not say anything like, 'this money is to pay for the damage to be put right'.

I paid the cheque into my account. A few weeks later, the company contacted me to say that they sent me the cheque by mistake, and that they meant to pay a contractor that they had booked to do the work. They want me to repay the money.

My view is that they have basically given me a gift and then changed their mind about it, so have no right to demand it back. There was nothing in their communication that could have led me to think this was a mistake - their letter was, basically, 'Hi Hamster, following your complaint, here's some money to make it right'.

Can anyone advise about the law here?

The OP hasn't suffered any actual loss.

But the letter doesn't refer to compensation for any loss. It specifically refers to a gesture of goodwill in order to restore the customer's faith in the company.

Have you ever received a goodwill payment of more than £100 though?

Have you ever received a goodwill payment of more than £100 though?

The fact the company raised a cheque and an accompanying letter showed a clear intention, it doesn't matter what the value was. Whether or not that intention was real or an error isn't the OPs fault or concern.

Who knows, they may have had an internal customer services process cock-up, someone in the team was confused about who they were apologising to, given that there was the OP and the landlord as separate individuals in this matter.

An internal communications break-down isn't the OPs fault, and they will never get to know how it all happened, neither should they become embroiled in the company's admin error. The OP has a perfect plausible and valid reason for refusing to repay it, and I expect the company's legal team will be weighing up reputational harm along with other risks to the business, and they'll have to write it off.

I would advise the OP to send the company a letter with their position on this, that they received the cheque and accompanying letter from the company, that the letter was clear evidence of the organisation's intention (due to mentioning the matter of restoring faith in the product that the OP had used) and that they were within their rights to spend the money.

I see this as an entirely different situation to the other scenario we get on the Employment Issues Board, where an employer overpays a member of staff. In that situation they are duty bound to highlight the overpayment to their employer as soon as they realise it, and work with their employer to agree reasonable repayment schedule. And if it is their employer who highlights the error, to be helpful and transparent in sorting out the overpayment.

Cheeky fuckers!

How on earth do they think this behaviour will restore your faith!

Any tenant would be really stressed about losing their entire deposit over decorating, and fighting companies over stuff like this is stressful.

The letter is clear that they were sending a goodwill gesture.

I would quite simply ignore their request for return of the money.

My lawyer relative concludes that the customer service staff are clueless. This relative can't understand why the company involved themselves with the landlord ... It was me who had the complaint, so would have been simpler for the company to reimburse me and then I could have in turn compensated the landlord, who could have made a claim against me. This relative sees the company as having compensated me (via the cheque), and whatever dealings they may have had with the landlord/agent are nothing to do with me, but are between the company and those people. So, whatever the company is losing by me keeping their money is compensated by their choosing to employ clueless people in their customer service dept! Might be a false economy, but that's not my problem ...