Garages caught cheating over servicing

Garages in north London are routinely overcharging and defrauding motorists who use them to service their cars, an undercover swoop by trading standards officers has revealed.

Officers visiting 11 garages at random in Enfield found that not one carried out the service correctly, missing defects and failing to carry out safety checks. Several missed a fault which, if neglected, could lead to steering failure.

Ray Brewer, chief trading standards officer for Enfield, said: 'I have no grounds to suspect that there's any difference at all between garages in Enfield and the rest of London. The fact that not one garage got it right rings alarm bells for consumers.

Some garages tried to pull the wool over the customer's eyes. In four instances, they said that work needed to be done which was unnecessary - for example, replacing brakeshoes that had not really worn out. In other cases, the garages charged for jobs that had not been done.

Trading standards officers, who will not name any of the 11 garages visited, are prosecuting the three worst offenders under the Trade Descriptions Act.

The trading standards officers posed as ordinary customers and had the car checked by an expert before and after the service.

The exercise, which covered garages ranging from authorised dealers to small back-street operations, also exposed inconsistencies in MoT testing.

The same car passed with flying colours at four garages, but flunked the test at another three. Each gave a different reason for failure. There were also huge differences in the cost of the service, from pounds 50 to pounds 230.

The Automobile Association and the Institute of Trading Standards Administration last week launched a campaign to improve consumer protection for motorists, including safeguards against car servicing rip-offs. They are calling for it to become a criminal offence for garages to make a car unroadworthy through negligent repair work.

John Anderson, manager for government affairs at the AA, said: 'The findings of Enfield trading standards officers very much bear out the results of our own surveys of motorists.

'There are a minority of dealers who systematically rip off consumers. Getting convictions is notoriously difficult because it's the customer's word against the garage.'

Geoff Dossetter, director of public affairs for the British Motor Industry Federation, which represents the garage industry, said there could often be differences of opinion between engineers about what work needed doing on a car.

The Enfield findings are consistent with the results of similar, larger-scale exercises carried out by other trading standards departments and by the Consumers' Association.

In 1993, there were more than 1,400 complaints to consumer protection bodies about garage servicing in London.

The problem for consumers is knowing which garages are cowboys and which are trustworthy. Enfield trading standards department wants to introduce a scheme to award certificates to garages that agree to meet quality standards and to undergo regular inspection.