Default for £9, can anything be done?

Jazzking

Hi All,

My OH and I were having a look through our Equifax records this weekend, and I noticed a few things on hers that could be causing CC applications to be declined.

I might mention that both of these of these occured when she split up with her ex back in 2003, and moved address to live with me and since then she's been pretty good with her finances and not missed any payments...

First there's a loan that she missed two months' months payments on, but that got settled by another loan when she moved up here which she's always paid on time.

Secondly, when she left her ex, she had an account with a catalogue company that she thought she'd cleared but having looked at the credit report it appears there was £9 left on it when she moved house and no payments were made on it for 6 months which resulted in a default being recorded. It is now marked at settled as of August 2003.

Is there anything that can be done about this default since no letters were forwarded to her informing her that there was money owed or do we just have to write it off and wait for 4 more years for it to drop off the account?

When CC companies do a credit search and see a default, will they notice that it's only for £9 and ignore it, or will they treat it the same as if it were a default of £900?
There are no CCJs or any other bad records on the account, just those two above.

One more thing, the default is registered at her old address; when she applies for credit, if she doesn't include that address in the "3 years previous addresses" will it not show up, or are they all linked by name? Just asking as when we looked at our reports, I didn't list my student halls of residence when it asked for my previous addresses and nothing came up on the report, even though I know I applied for credit there...

Sorry for the long post and all the questions, but since we are now financially linked (joint mortgage) I thought I'd better look into this!

Thanks in advance!