ELAS Group

We were with this company for 3 years. I wrote to cancel the contract, they said my cancellation was 3 days late and continued to bill us saying they have auto renewed.

They had not sent warning of auto renewal or information on prices, yet in every other year they have had a new contract signed.

We wrote several e mails which were ignored. They continued to bully us to pay for a service we had not agreed to. They then took us to court and I was going to represent myself to save costs, but it took so much of my time and my priority was my business, so I paid to settle, even though we had not used the service or agreed to it.

Then ELAS have sent another bill for this year, they have auto renewed us again.

It is really awful what they have done, they are bully's and need to be put in prison. I wish someone would do something to stop them.

Last Thursday I contacted elas and the girl I spoke to "Rachel" was very rude and unhelpful. I then asked to speak to somebody else and was refused that. Very unprofessional.

Google ELAS REVIEWS, before using this company, this will confirm that I am not alone in having problems with this company. We used this company and they automatically renewed our policy WITHOUT contacting us first, once this was done they refused to accept cancellation by email.

There are several other companies offering a similar and better service, this company relies on using underhand methods in my opinion to tie you into their contract and make it very difficult to cancel unless you get your timing right. Here is their reply they CANNOT accept cancellation unless it is by RECORDED DELIVERY, shocking in this day and age, email and fax appears not to be good enough for them.

If you are facing an employment tribunal and are a small business these people will contact you from the tribunals lists. They will then attempt to scare you (especially if you plan to represent yourself) by telling you of large sums of money you could potentially loose. They will then try and sell you a service where a lawyer (so you think but actually they guy they sent is no longer a registered lawyer) comes and represents you for this case and then a 3year contract that then protects you from any further tribunals.

What I found - The person (because he was no longer a barrister) that came wanted to go home early. His main aim for to force a settlement and gave his adviceaccordingly. In our case the judge had said that the maximum payout the claimant would get is X and this guy was advising us to settle for X- 10% . So if we lost the case really badly and we made every mistake possible we still would have only had to pay X.

By settling and including the fee we had to pay them, we ended up paying more. Had we had fought the case and lost I reckon we still would have had to pay less as the maximum was not far off what we settled for.

After this i complained to them and was giving the senior mangers details Mr P Mooney who doesn't respond to emails and never calls you back. It took me 6 months to get a response from him and his response was on the lines of 'I can't comment' and we have done nothing wrong. He failed to answer any of my questions.

My advise for anyone thinking of using them -DON'T! They are not regulated in any way so if your not happy with their service there is nothing you can do. They delibratly ignore for months. Anyone facing an employment tribunal do not fall for their scare tactics like we did. A judge will look at the whole picture and if you are a small business there is a lot more leeway then these guys will make out.

ELAS approached me towards the end of April to extend our contract for some document creating software. As the product itself if useless (all the documents can be downloaded for free and the additional HR programs are just expensive toys to replace simple Excel spreadsheets) we decided not to pay another £1000 for this year. I called the rep (who came out a day and a half before our contract expired) and let him know over the telephone about our intentions of cancelling. He understood it.

I kept receiving letters about payment which I considered delay in the cancellation process. A woman called me asking for payment in June (2 months later). I told her what happened and that we didn't want to use their services. She asked me to send her a letter (can be attached in an email - she told me) which I immediately did.

She contacted me again a few days ago saying they wanted payment as they haven't received our cancellation request. Although I explained that I did everything as instructed, she now told me an email was not acceptable as it doesn't have a signature... (which - on the contract - will be a different person as my ancestor has left and was a different story from what she told me a month earlier).

I am now waiting for a copy of our signed contract and if necessary will make payment of course, but not once has the written cancellation request been brought to my attention for 2 months. There is apparently a 3 months cancellation period (for a ***, useless software we haven't used once and that we need to renew specifically?) which was mentioned for the first time today and never before. It may be in our contract, probably in the fine print, but if they had advised me what I needed to do in the first instance, I might not feel like they are only looking for more and more ways to make sure you pay.

This company seems like a total rip off, I would advise everybody against them. They clearly only interested in getting your money with a product any average third grade student can overperform.

If you need any more details, please look me up on google and contact me.

Peter Szabo

Canada Water Dental Health