electro-web

Just over a month ago, we hired a company called Adore Cleaning to come and clean our flat. We were hosting a dinner party and hadn’t had a lot of time to clean properly for a couple of weeks. The company came and assessed the flat for the work and time that it needed.

Unfortunately, we weren’t entirely happy with them. We felt some areas had been missed, and the curtain rail had been pulled off the wall in the bedroom leaving a hole in the plasterboard (they claimed they didn’t do it, so I guess the cats must’ve leapt up and dragged the curtain rail out). We sent off an angry email, as is the customer’s prerogative – to be angry when they feel they’ve been let down by a company. We expected a curt “Sorry you weren’t happy, we’ll send your keys back” (in other words a calm and professional response to our complaint) and that would have been the end of it. But what we received was a 3000 word tirade about how filthy our home was and how they felt they’d done a good job given the circumstances.

We were astonished. With this being the 21st century, we wrote a blog post about it detailing our complaints and posting their email response. It was a review of what we felt to be bad service. Nothing wrong with that, you might think.

But Adore Cleaning threatened us with libel.

Now, the UK libel laws are some of the most restrictive in the world. It’s the only area of law where the defendant is guilty unless they can prove innocence. In other words, you have to prove what you say is true and it’s very expensive to do so.

I don’t believe anything we posted was libellous, it was opinion about a service. But we have neither the time, nor the money (nor, for that matter, the inclination) to fight a libel case.

We also posted a bad review to freeindex.com – a listings site that allows users to post their experiences. That review was removed, and reviews for Adore Cleaning have been disabled. It’s a shame that in the world of free sharing of information and experiences, a site that supposedly allows reviews will remove bad ones on request. It somewhat devalues the point if only good experiences remain on the site.

It’s also a shame that libel laws, or the threat of them, can be used against small-time bloggers and people posting their opinions online. Something seems broken if you can’t tell other people to avoid a company when you’ve had a negative experience.

I got an amazing desk patrol dalek for my birthday. Unfortunately it’s not very bright…