too late at night to read all 40+ points ... but I thank you for bringing such matter to the wider public domain and look forward to the result with interest. Please do update this discussion thread at the appropriate time.

Edited by Smileyman on 10/11/2018 at 21:12

11 faults either not fixed or not reported, job done by apprentice!

My local garage does a one hour service for £40, bring your own parts. I usually get an oil and filter change (parts £20) plus one other thing like brakes or coolant flush, and a full inspection and balance all 4 wheels.

Very interesting. And a novel defence - if Halfords win then that'll be a huge blow for trading standards - I suspect it would have to lead to a change in the law.

Halfords case seems to have been a deliberate attempt to close off possibility of test purchases by trading standards by saying a Trading Standards Officer (TSO) was not a consumer.

The District Judge, a role formerly known as a Stipendiary Magistrate so meeting the judicial selection criteria of n years as solicitor/barrister, decided they were right. appealed by case stated to the High Court. The Justices found that while the TSO was not a consumer it made no material difference and other limbs of the legal definition of a consumer purchase were met. They've remitted it to the Magistrates to re-decide in light of High Court's findings in law.

Halfords might then decide to change their plea to guilty or pursue some alternative defence.

I think fact that a major national player in car service/repair business even attempted to stymie Consumer protection law as they did deserves widespread publicity of the name and shame variety.

Jeez - no wonder lawyers charge so much........umpteen pages of A4 and still no discussion of the faults! What were they? For those with no time to waste reading legal verbiage, paras 17. and 19. give the gist of it.

People put their trust in garages that their cars are safe to drive, these cars carry families and drive at high speeds on congested roads ... and even if the car driver is not bothered I don't want to be a victim of an accident with an unsafe vehicle, people can die, lives changed etc.

Where this is interesting, though, is the context of the car, leading to the perspective of the owner.

An awful lot of people determine the quality of a garage/MOT to be one that reports (and therefore costs) as little as possible. If additional things are picked up, the vehicle owner makes wild suggestions of dishonest and fraudulent practices in order to invoice more work.

Your opinion (and that of another segment of the public) suggest the opposite - there are vehicle owners who want to know everything that could be an issue, in order for the car to be correctly maintained (perhaps the types who would rather replace a tyre than fix a puncture, for example).

Then, as a third category, you get franchised chains such as Halfords garnering a reputation for finding jobs that don't need doing (e.g. gas shocks suspiciously leaking WD40).

Of course a good honest technician/mechanic will report and assess based on the full information available - e.g. if the discs are a bit worn and the pads are half worn, that's normal and not necessarily an indication of a fault - but some other garages, for various reasons, may choose to take a more hyperbolic view. It's certainly a difficult industry to work in from that perspective (from experience), and so I don't think it's possible to actually make a judgement as to how poor the service was - certainly without knowing the detail of what TS deemed as faults.

Edited by engine on 11/11/2018 at 20:29

Maybe this particular branch was out of order but others may be ok.