Joanne Tait paid Craig Reddin a $4000 deposit to refresh her bathroom. Over a year later not a tile has been touched – but will the Disputes Tribunal sort the matter out? Gill Higgins of Fair Go reports.
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Joanne Tait wanted a bathroom refresh. A simple enough project. But over a year later, her old avocado suite is still avocado, still falling apart and yet Tait is nearly $4000 out of pocket.
The tradesman she hired to do the work was Craig Reddin of Outside In Complete Maintenance Ltd. Tait describes their first meeting at her Wellington home. “When Craig came round he seemed a reasonable sort of guy, he had the gift of the gab and when he looked at the room he said ‘Yeah, I can do all that. That’s fine. No problem whatsoever.”
So in September last year, Tait agreed to hand over a deposit of $3850 for a new bath and accessories. It was just over 50% of the $7000 total he said the job would cost.
Weeks went by but Tait wasn’t too worried at that stage. She told him she was OK to wait till after Christmas for the work to be done. But by April, still nothing. Not a single tile had been replaced. Tait had had enough and asked him to pay back the deposit so she could employ someone else. To this day, she’s not been repaid.
What does the Disputes Tribunal do?
This isn’t just a story about a tradesman failing to do the work he’s supposed to, or failing to refund a deposit, it’s a story about how incredibly difficult it can be to get your money back in this kind of situation, however hard you try. Kiwis have the Disputes Tribunal to help, but even if an award is made in the complainant’s favour, it can be too easy for the debtor to ignore it and walk away. It’s then up to the complainant to follow up with the District Court, to decide what action to take, to gather information and to pay for any enforcement measures to be taken.
Joanne Tait began the process by paying for a Disputes Tribunal hearing. Craig Reddin didn’t turn up but the tribunal found in Tait’s favour anyway. Reddom subsequently received an order to pay Tait back. But he did no such thing. So Tait then went to the District Court and paid to engage a bailiff. She also had to pay to get a financial assessment done. At this point, she discovered Outside In Complete Maintenance Limited was being removed from the Companies Register and that Reddin had deposited her money into his personal bank account. So she cancelled the bailiff and had to pay for another hearing against Craig Reddin personally rather than against his company.
The experience has left Tait feeling fed up and wondering why there’s so much onus on the victim to drive action through. “I’m reading all the forms and I’m thinking, this is just ridiculous – why am I doing all this work?”.
It turns out others have had problems with Craig Reddin too, as Tait discovered after posting her experience on her Facebook page. She was surprised by the number of people who responded. Like her, some had gone to the Disputes Tribunal. Fair Go saw the records for two of these cases. As with Tait’s experience, Reddin failed to attend the hearings for either of these cases. And as with Tait’s experience, payment wasn’t forthcoming.
So what does Craig Reddin have to say? Well, when Fair Go called, he answered. This is interesting to note, because Tait’s hearing was by phone. His explanation for not attending was that the notification was sent to the wrong address. But as it was a phone hearing, the Tribunal also rang him twice on the number we called, and left a message. Reddin told me he missed the call and is “hopeless with picking up messages”. He said the notification being sent to the wrong address was why he hadn’t attended one of the other hearings, but in the one where he owed the complainant $9000 he had no excuse, simply saying “completely my fault, I’ve got no reason for that at all”.
So what about lack of payment? He referred to problems such as having had a heart attack and Covid, and that he’d bought hardware for some jobs and so didn’t have the money to hand. He pointed out he did pay back the $9000 he owed in one of the cases. It’s true, but it took well over a year and it was only after the customer had paid for financial assessments and warrants to seize goods.
When will victims get more support?
Joanne Tait feels it’s too easy for debtors to miss hearings and ignore rulings. She asks how it’s possible for such people to get away with it time and again. Fair Go has been lobbying MInisters of Justice to beef up the Disputes Tribunal system for four years now. Back in 2020, former Minister Andrew Little agreed the current process wasn’t good enough. He said enforcement powers should be strengthened and that a blacklist for repeat offenders was a good idea. Then a year later, former MInister Kris Faafoi told Fair Go he was waiting to hear advice from the Judiciary Rules Committee on how best to make any change. The committee gave it’s advice – not surprisingly, it said enforcement powers should be strengthened and enforcement fees should potentially be scrapped. That was in 2022. And here we are in 2024 and nothing has changed.
So Fair Go approached the current Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith. He was keen to front to explain his plans for making sure the Disputes Tribunal is better at serving the needs of complainants. So will we finally see the changes that are needed? Watch the full story on TVNZ+.
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