Letter from Smith Lawson & Company owning money?

Taiko

It'll be the registry that you need to speak with.

red_eye

LemonSocks wrote: »

I've had a letter this morning from Smith Lawson & Company Recovery Services this morning saying I owe £630.00. The letter says I have 7 days to pay (the letter was actually sent on the 10th but only arrived today so now I only have 1 day to pay).

I think that this is related to my first year at a prior university. I completed the first year but I ended up moving to another university where I started a fresh course. Whilst I was setting up my finances for my fresh course I had letters claiming repayments for overpaid grant due to not finishing my course. However as I'd completed that first year in full & went straight onto a new course, after phoning up SLC & sorting it out they said I wasn't supposed to pay it. I figured that was sorted.

I'm now near the end of my final year of this course & have just had this letter & I have no idea why. It a pretty threatening letter considering this is the first I've heard of SLC in years (and the first I've ever heard of Smith Lawson & Company).

I'll phone them (or should I write to them?) this afternoon to find out more details, but has anyone dealt with Smith Lawson & Co before? Does anyone have any advice?

Edit: I've just gone through all my old SLC letters. Unfortunately I no longer have the ones from that long ago. The only letter I've had from SLC this year is how much my total loans amount to so far. I've had absolutely nothing else from them.

write, never ever phone (they and SFE lie to you). However I have emailed SLC and they replayed saying that they only deal with collecting, I have to contact SFE

RA77IEL

Smith Lawson and Company - Dodgy Debt Collectors

Smith Lawson and Company sends threatening letters out to people the Student Loans Company thinks owes the Government money. The SLC takes no part in determining if debts are actually due but just acts as the bag man collecting payments.

You might think from the form of the letters and the appearance of them that Smith Lawson and Company is a proper debt collection agency or firm of solicitors, but it isn't.

From the Student Loans Company Report - ,Smith Lawson and Company is our in-house collections brand or as others might put it a make believe collections agency designed to threaten debtors by pretending to be something it isn't. If the SLC actually goes down the legal debt collection agency it employs an outside agency. You might expect this dodgy subterfuge from a Rachmanesque agency but not from a Government department.

Having checked on the CV of the head man of the SLC I shouldn't have been surprised:

LOOK up Keith Bedell-Pearce in Who's Who and you will read that he is a distinguished solicitor with an impressive record in the boardrooms of some of Britain's top firms. His rewards from these years of service include a £3 million mansion.

But you will not read that he presided over the worst of the pensions and endowment misselling that has blighted the finance industry for the past two decades. ..He was the man in charge of Prudential's salesforce just when mis-selling of pensions and mortgage endowments reached its shameful peak in the late Eighties. ....

RA77IEL

I believe the STUDENT LOANS COMPANY LIMITED have realised that a proportion of their loans will never be repaid under the agreed terms and so now employ underhand tactics to recover their losses Refusing deferments for petulant reasons and demanding outstanding debts be collected.Sending back dated deadline letters and masquerading as a recovery company "Smith Lawson & Co" (ludicrously still using an SLC email address and telephone number) threatening demands for the full debt amount.