A deflating experience

Let me introduce you to a business my wife came across during a fraught journey down the M1 the other week.

Welcome to the world of roadside recovery.

My wife suffered a heart-in-mouth blowout while driving our children down to friends and a recovery firm contracted by the Highways Agency took her car to a motorway service station. They charged her £145 for the pleasure.

On the steep side, may be, but it is a charge allowed by the Highways Agency contract, which does not like to see vehicles stuck or tyres being replaced on the hard shoulder. Indeed, one of the first things the Agency tells you is that you’ve got two hours to shift yourself.
Understandably, my wife was stressed out by the whole experience, had two children to care for and asked the recovery man for help to change take the damaged wheel off and put the spacesaver spare on. So he did. It took just over three minutes.
And they charged her £80.
To begin with, he said they wanted paying in cash and kindly pointed out a cash till which she might like to fetch the money from. Eventually, after liaising with 'the gaffer', they accepted a credit card. Which is what she’d used to pay for the Highways Agency fee in the first place.
Cash or credit, a rate which equates to £1,600 an hour for taking one wheel off and putting another one on is, I’m sure you’ll agree, very nice work if you can get it. Better, indeed, than many corporate lawyers charge.
And much better than the professional tyre depot in Northampton which eventually took the flat tyre off the wheel, fitted a new one and balanced the wheel for good measure. They took 22 minutes and charged £65. For parts AND labour.

For some reason, I find the tyre depot far easier to recommend than the Highways Agency-approved Crouch Recovery.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I contacted Crouch Recovery to inquire about their scale of charges.

They kindly agreed to reduce it to £60, which takes that theoretical hourly rate for wheel-swapping down to a miserly £1,200. They protested that they had to cover the costs they had invested in equipment and training. I pointed out that since the wheel-swap was discretionary and not part of the Highways Agency contract their costs had already been covered in the £145.

There was no response to that. There is none: it is an unreasonable charge because it bears no relationship to the service delivered.

The message here is simple. If you travel through the M1 in the East Midlands, make sure you’ve got your own breakdown cover. Otherwise it won’t just be a tyre that deflates.

There is a postscript to this. My wife took a call from the Highways Agency last week asking for some feedback about the way the service had been delivered by their appointed agent.

As the French might say, la vengeance se mange très-bien froide.