SFE Invitations - Duress Code

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

You're not sure it applies, but I am certain your suggestion doesn't. To sign it under duress, SFE would need to force you to take it out, with there being no other option. There are other options, as I listed previously.

I am sure there is a case to be answered and you are making it clear that you do not wish to answer the case.

What is the difference between me as a young person going to my own bank - the only bank with whom as a young person I have built up any creditworthiness perhaps, and asking for a loan to help out with everything while I improve my job chances by say buying a car or buying a training course or anything in fact with a view to improving my life chances and having to go to SFE for the same thing except for a loan, the size of which, no UK retail bank would ever authorise unless it was secured lending?

Then do tell us, putting aside the size of the loan for the moment, but accepting that in both cases there is no choice of lender at the sum requested, what then is the difference between that same bank misselling the loan because actually you cannot afford it and a university selling you a course knowing full well you can't afford a loan of any size other than by gambling and putting off repayment into some airy fairy future, and who tell you well it's not a loan its a tax? And then going further into the misselling arena the difference between the lender as part of the sale getting you to sign a paper immediately diverting half the loan out of your control and giving it to a favoured service supplier (on the one hand say a PPI provider with insider links to the bank and on the other a tuition service provider (a university) with all sorts of direct links with the lender (SFE).

I challenge you to explain to MSE'ers why one scenario is clearly a mis-sale on at least two counts, affordability and duress and the other (your area of expertise) is not. Remember please that we are talking about loan contracts not tuition fee contracts. Why can SFE get away with a practice which is completely outlawed now at the banks AND at massively larger sums which would only be possible within the province of extensive and rigorous individual fact-finding over at least two in depth interviews with a specialist, a required level of proven stable income, and secured lending only at a retail bank? Even interest only mortgages where you make your own plan to pay back the original capital are now outlawed.

SFE loans are "secured", but only in the sense that they are shackled to your life and well-being - a ball and chain round your neck countenanced through disgraceful recent statutes meaning you cannot shake it off for 30 years no matter what. And unless you stay the course and keep your heels clean, nastier still things might befall you in terms of early repayment demands and private debt collectors. Never mind that you were told "its not a loan it is just a tax". Is that not so?

How can anyone actually "afford" to sign up for such a scheme unless they have a guaranteed means of releasing themselves from the liability by straightforward loan payback via income or inheritance or pension tax free sums or by maturing endowment policy, or by bankruptcy? Thirty years of servitude is a long time to wait for a blessed release.

D is for Duress whether it is whilst sat down at a desk in a bank and encouraged to buy PPI simultaneously with a loan (now outlawed) or whether it is sat at home doing the only thing possible (contrary to Taiko's cloud cuckoo or rich person's alternatives) and applying for an SFE loan like the good schoolchildren you were when you applied.

Coercion is a Duress crime. Nasty word coercion ... sounds too harsh for it to be being applied by sponsorship of the government, doesn't it?

D is still for Duress until someone states a proper case for the defence ...

atypical

This is a bizarre thread.

You're not being forced to take the loan, even if it's the only way you could afford higher education. You're making the choice to take the loan because you want a higher education. The state does not owe you a higher education.

SFE does not have to behave like a bank because it is not a bank. It operates within the parameters given to it by government which has a legitimate mandate from 'the people' to set the rules.

Whether this 'D' would serve any use is a separate matter. If it makes you feel better, continue writing it.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Oh come on. Not being forced to take the loan? Who are you trying to kid?

How else as a schoolchild encouraged to get high grades with a view to university do you achieve what the majority of high performing children at school consequently aspire to? The government now won't pay but says the universities are still the best in the world and must be kept so. They ncan't survive without UG throughput. So who is their intended market? The children that are encouraged by the government to go uni of course. How? By using the unique government guaranteed Student Loan Scheme. If you have no money and no income how else do you find funding for such horribly inflated tuition and accommodation fees ? Student Rents up 8.5% this year - how can that be?

Do you remember that stupid couple of weeks 6 months or so ago where they tried for a few days in the media to give us a concentrated spin that apprenticeship schemes were a viable alternative? What a sick joke that was. If we had a proper technical school setup as has been the prime alternative in Europe for decades, then maybe there might be something in that, but a few kids in overalls saying isn't it wonderful won't hack it.

You may think this thread is bizarre (whatever you mean by that piece of urban insult vocabulary) and you might be subservient and completely susceptible to the requirements of hair-brained schemes dreamed up by others, but there is real money being loaned here to children and it is being snatched straight up past their noses before they can even count it by privateers cosied up to government.

If you are English, and you don't have an extra passport from somewhere else, you can't go to university in the UK unless you pay £9000 a year to a university authorised by a weak government to sting you for that much without justification other than a pile of old red bricks or some other outdated tosh reasoning.

Who ends up with the debt once the invoices are issued? You do if you are the student.

Ask those students from earlier schemes who now find that their debts have been sold to private companies or students who dropped out and found themselves being chased by debt collectors.

Students own the debt. Not taxpayers. Students. And it IS debt. It's not vanishing cream. The shadow and stain it leaves lasts 30 years.

The government has no mandate to break laws, misrepresent risk and sucker children into massive liabilities, and you quite frankly amaze me when you suggest robbery like that has been properly legitimated.

We the people are sick of politicians papering over the cracks of this country being broke, and spinning lies over and around the mess that causes. We'd rather know the truth. If the truth of the matter is that we can't afford to educate our young people let us have a proper debate about alternatives. We must look at what else we are spending which is becoming increasingly unfair e.g. whether perhaps we should reduce the priority on honouring outrageous public sector benefits and confiscate a proportion of civil service pension funds which have become obscenely generous against the norm and has tendency to creating a nasty bunch of self-righteous know-it-alls with regards to views on subjects like tuition fees.

Let us decide to lock up a good number of senior bankers and confiscate large parts of banker pension schemes and confiscate all oustanding share options promised to bankers as bonuses into the ownership of the government. Let us then ban share option schemes for bankers and review it for others. In my years in business I have seen no good come of it - just greed and ultimately very skewed board decisions. If they don't like it they can walk. We don't need that kind of capitalism. It isn't sound risk taking or entrepreneurship, it is often much closer to theft.

The whole banking industry was propped up by the taxpayer. Not just Northern Rock, Lloyds and RBS. All of the banks have been propped up by us and then they have continued to take us for a ride. Gut them instead before we sell our children down the river.

We are sick of cronyism which hands over groups of vulnerable members of our society like pensioners in need of kindness and care, and like children who need a university education, to privateers to be pillaged and abused and shackled to unfair mis-sold contracts in the name of the government or public private partnership / outsourcing.


To my mind your few comments sound like either you have a hidden interest in furthering the existing student loan scheme, or else perhaps you inexplicably just have a blind trust in your government - now that would indeed truly be bizarre.

atypical

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

Not being forced to take the loan? Who are you trying to kid? How else as a schoolchild encouraged to get high grades with a view to university do you achieve what the majority of high performing children at school consequently aspire to?

The situation you describe is of a person choosing to go to university. This has a cost associated with it. How or whether they can meet this cost is a matter for them.

One option is to take a student loan. The terms of the loan are clearly set. If the person judges them acceptable, they take the loan. If not, they have to find other funding or cannot go to university.

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

The government has no mandate to break laws, misrepresent risk and sucker children into massive liabilities, and you quite frankly amaze me when you suggest robbery like that has been properly legitimated.

Government has no right to do that and isn't according to the majority view (and the view of the High Court which considered the regulations and did not judge them unlawful).

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Judgements in the High Court are frequently discredited in matters where judges are completely intellectually unable to understand the completeness of what they are judging.

I give you reattribution in the financial services with profits arena as a classic example.

You can buy a High Court judgement in the same way as you can buy the US presidency. I am not talking bribery and I am not talking corruption of the judiciary. I am talking of inadequately resourced opposition and the sad fact that the judiciary can be so easily led when they have no understanding of complex arguments and precedents (or rather the lack of presentation of precedents - plenty exist but the opposition is not organised enough) presented to them for judgement. We can't all be judges, and we can't all be experts on global finance, corporate trickery and consequences of unbridled political spin.

It means nothing.

We know it means nothing - use your moral compass if you can remember how it works and then do something about it please.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

***BUMP***

You are a fresher starting imminently.

You have received your SFE loan and grant letter of course and your university has confirmed your place and things might look complete / just waiting for you to arrive ...

But not quite, maybe you have an invoice for £9,000 and your only weapon against it is your SFE offer. Maybe you are to send it back to the uni like that. Have you any choice? Some say you have - go or no go - one way involves a loan ultimately of unknown proportions - the other, a life wondering if you should have gone to uni when you had the chance.

Daunting for many young people - you included? You are resigned to signing. OK sign it but add a "D" somewhere nearby or near your name.

It doesn't matter if you have already submitted previous forms with no "D" marked. Start now. This includes Bursary offers from the universities themselves. They are mostly conditional on you confirming the SFE offer of maximum £3,354 maintenance grant. It's all wheels within wheels. Your offer of a grant or scholarship might actually be rather small beer compared to someone with the same grades doing a similar course at a different university. As I have seen, it could mean someone going to a university in a large city only gets half what another student receives on a cheaper living campus out in the sticks. Yeah you heard right. It is happening right now in the name of the government. The universities are each presenting these "scholarships/bursaries" to students of low income families because HMG asked them to do so but gave them carte blanche on how to fiddle the cashback.


If you are feeling confused or hard done by, well there is a chance to put down a simple marker now ...

*D is for Dodgy and for Duress and for Doodle and if you ever in the future feel the need to remind someone how you got into a particularly sticky mess, then perhaps you might point to your little 2013 doodle in the corner of the form and tell them it meant you were terribly unsure about it all (naturally). Dare to do it. You are in control of your life. You are the Director of the film which is the story of your future life. In this scene you marked a "D" before you posted the envelope. The scene might end up on the cutting room floor, but then again the director may decide he or she can use it later.


PS While you are at it, ask for more. I have seen evidence of a scholarship offer of £3,000 fee waiver reducing the fee to £6,000pa and in addition, £3,000pa in cash that will be on top of the £3,354 pa SFE maintenance grant. Anyone seen any higher this year?
PPS If you are not receiving a full maintenance grant I commiserate. It is not your fault you parents earn a better than average wage. In some parts of Europe they would earn more than GBP26,000 just for stacking supermarket shelves and maybe that's what yours do anyway for double the hours just to make ends meet - and then you get less than a maximum grant. You too can use a "D" on finance submissions to remind yourself what you think about it, and you too can ask for more if you have received an inadequate "inbetween" sort of scholarship or bursary as a result of your university's fiddling around the edges on behalf of HMG.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

You are a fresher. Yes it's Monday 16th September 2013 - it's 9AM and either your first day at uni or it soon will be. Don't forget that the university has a central course/student finance office and are right now reviewing and revising applications and sending emails and letters that will please the lucky few for 2013/14.

Yes it seems that applications needed to be in ages ago and yes it seems you have already received an SFE offer and maybe a university scholarship/bursary too? So it is set in stone now, right? WRONG!!

Those offices are still working overtime and indeed they will be working throught the year until the money runs out.

Claim your place in the queue by arriving at their service counter or phoning today. Check and double check and treble check that you have squeezed every last penny out of the scholarship/bursary system. If the circumstances have changed in your household and your Mum or your Dad has lost their job or had to take a wage cut or moved out or waved some permanent goodbye and good riddance to you instead of continuing to support you fully in your chosen direction then first get straight onto SFE and make sure that you are reassessed quickly/your offer is revised.

Even those who have not had their offers revised in terms of the offers themselves will likely have received two or three different restatements of the offer with the tiniest of variations to reflect a change of address or a correction of the spelling of a name or the change of a bank account and it is just as easy for SFE to send out a new one to you tomorrow with the offer increased if you give them a good enough reason - you won't know if the reason is good enough until you contact them.

And as silvercar has reminded in another thread, yes it is still possible for revisions to be made at SFE like this, and normally the change would automatically cascade down to the university who would also reassess scholarships/bursaries based on the same new info, but as time is now getting on, after speaking to SFE and getting yourself quickly reassessed, then don't hesitate to "nudge" the the university directly to wake them up to the same change.

And the best of luck for 2013/14 ! You all Deserve the best !


"D" is for Deserving and "D" is for Duress if you aren't getting what you deserve and you almost certainly are not in the grander scheme of things. Mark a Discreet D somewhere near your name or signature on any submissions from now on as a marker for the future when you might wish to point at the loans and remind HMG that you had precious little choice but to sign under duress.

kirkwisebeard

Higher education is not a right... it is a choice... if you choose to go into it, you hae to accept the t&cs... it would only be duress if it was the law that you had to go to university or face punishment, or if you were forced against your will to go... did you have any other choices you could make? If not, if it was for some reason impossible for you to get a job, or go on the dole, then you might have a case... it's the difference between applying for a crap job that doesn't pay enough and accepting that job, and being dragged from your home and forced into slavery... it's the difference between losing weight on a limited diet at a health farm that you chose to go to, and losing weight in a concentration camp that you were forcibly incarcerated in... as long as the t&cs of a student loan etc are correctly described, and you have the choice to walk out and not accept the loan,
there is no duress when you sign up for it...

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

kirkwisebeard wrote: »

Higher education is not a right... it is a choice... if you choose to go into it, you hae to accept the t&cs... it would only be duress if it was the law that you had to go to university or face punishment, or if you were forced against your will to go... did you have any other choices you could make? If not, if it was for some reason impossible for you to get a job, or go on the dole, then you might have a case... it's the difference between applying for a crap job that doesn't pay enough and accepting that job, and being dragged from your home and forced into slavery... it's the difference between losing weight on a limited diet at a health farm that you chose to go to, and losing weight in a concentration camp that you were forcibly incarcerated in... as long as the t&cs of a student loan etc are correctly described, and you have the choice to walk out and not accept the loan,
there is no duress when you sign up for it...

Read your views. Doesn't work for me, kirkwise - I've been around too long, studied a lot, lived a lot and travelled a bit I guess.

If you don't expect too much then you cant be easily disappointed - is that your angle?

You will be familiar with Equality legislation. Most undergraduates are young people with very low if not zero income. They are by law given access to banking in their country of residence at age 18 but are not creditworthy enough to be able to secure big loans from commercial lenders to pay for university courses in their country of residence. There is one monopolistic exception - SFE and its regional equivalents will lend these large amounts at a variable rate of interest currently exceeding six times some people's mortgage interest rates. There is some age discrimination occurring. Is it against young people by denying them the right not to have a major loan missold to them by government agencies? Or is it against older people who wish to first earn and save enough for higher education but then find they are too old to benefit from so-called "support" to younger undergraduates?

Education is the right of every citizen of a so-called developed and civilised society. If you think otherwise but you call yourself a member of a developed civilised society then you perhaps do not belong other than on the fringe enjoying some benefits, making some contributions, but not not believing in a bigger picture?

Education civilises. Lack of education marginalises and skews attitudes in ugly ways which can cause violence when ignorance surfaces and masquerades as "the way".

So if you want to fulfill your promise as a contributing member of a developed civilised society you need to be given the opportunity to be educated to the highest level consistent with that societies values and your unadulterated ambition. You do not need to be told that higher education is a luxury by someone who does not understand the effect of education on a society versus the effect of a lack of education on a society who would call it a choice simply because (and self-evidently) they see their own situation as having been a choice in the matter of higher education (or not). To settle for less is what some do, and they may be happy to do so but we surely don't wish it or express it upon others as a choice - certainly not while they are still young i.e. before their dreams become downgraded (as we may have downgraded our own).

In the UK, and England especially at the moment if you wish to take the only opportunity on offer to progress from A levels to university then you have no choice but to deal with SFE at their terms. Else you will be denied the right to higher education.

That is a coercion. You do not have to be suffering threat of physical injury in order to be suffering duress from coercion. If you believe in higher education then you will sign up to SFE and you will be doing it under some kind of mental duress depending on how much of an unreasonable risk you are being encouraged to take. The ts & cs you refer to are as clear as mud but the deal clearly contains unquantified risk, very much like buying a house. When the UK government urges you to buy a house in order to take part in their version of developed civilised society then you are protected from misselling of the loan.

With an SFE loan, you cannot work out how much you will owe even if you can work out how much you will borrow. Just because someone pens some ts & cs, that does not make their name Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Mohammed, now does it?

That is why I urge all signatories to any loan deal with SFE to mark a discreet "D" for Duress on the paperwork somewhere near their name or signature. I suggest you may even wish to do this on university scholarship/bursary paperwork too (because they are operating very opaque loan cashback arrangements based on arbitrary tuition fees and partnerships with SFE). The same may apply with regional Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland agencies. mark a discreet "D" for Duress on the paperwork somewhere near their name or signature.

SlimmingSusan

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

Read your views. Doesn't work for me, kirkwise - I've been around too long, studied a lot, lived a lot and travelled a bit I guess.

If you don't expect too much then you cant be easily disappointed - is that your angle?

You will be familiar with Equality legislation. Most undergraduates are young people with very low if not zero income. They are by law given access to banking in their country of residence at age 18 but are not creditworthy enough to be able to secure big loans from commercial lenders to pay for university courses in their country of residence. There is one monopolistic exception - SFE and its regional equivalents will lend these large amounts at a variable rate of interest currently exceeding six times some people's mortgage interest rates. There is some age discrimination occurring. Is it against young people by denying them the right not to have a major loan missold to them by government agencies? Or is it against older people who wish to first earn and save enough for higher education but then find they are too old to benefit from so-called "support" to younger undergraduates?

Education is the right of every citizen of a so-called developed and civilised society. If you think otherwise but you call yourself a member of a developed civilised society then you perhaps do not belong other than on the fringe enjoying some benefits, making some contributions, but not not believing in a bigger picture?

Education civilises. Lack of education marginalises and skews attitudes in ugly ways which can cause violence when ignorance surfaces and masquerades as "the way".

So if you want to fulfill your promise as a contributing member of a developed civilised society you need to be given the opportunity to be educated to the highest level consistent with that societies values and your unadulterated ambition. You do not need to be told that higher education is a luxury by someone who does not understand the effect of education on a society versus the effect of a lack of education on a society who would call it a choice simply because (and self-evidently) they see their own situation as having been a choice in the matter of higher education (or not). To settle for less is what some do, and they may be happy to do so but we surely don't wish it or express it upon others as a choice - certainly not while they are still young i.e. before their dreams become downgraded (as we may have downgraded our own).

In the UK, and England especially at the moment if you wish to take the only opportunity on offer to progress from A levels to university then you have no choice but to deal with SFE at their terms. Else you will be denied the right to higher education.

That is a coercion. You do not have to be suffering threat of physical injury in order to be suffering duress from coercion. If you believe in higher education then you will sign up to SFE and you will be doing it under some kind of mental duress depending on how much of an unreasonable risk you are being encouraged to take. The ts & cs you refer to are as clear as mud but the deal clearly contains unquantified risk, very much like buying a house. When the UK government urges you to buy a house in order to take part in their version of developed civilised society then you are protected from misselling of the loan.

With an SFE loan, you cannot work out how much you will owe even if you can work out how much you will borrow. Just because someone pens some ts & cs, that does not make their name Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Mohammed, now does it?

That is why I urge all signatories to any loan deal with SFE to mark a discreet "D" for Duress on the paperwork somewhere near their name or signature. I suggest you may even wish to do this on university scholarship/bursary paperwork too (because they are operating very opaque loan cashback arrangements based on arbitrary tuition fees and partnerships with SFE). The same may apply with regional Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland agencies. mark a discreet "D" for Duress on the paperwork somewhere near their name or signature.

I am a 48 yr old mature student, who went to grammar school FREE after passing my 11 plus. I could have had a free uni education with a grant back in the day, but chose not to for various reasons.

I really hope I do not come across delusional, entitlement attitudes like this in my first year. I am choosing to do this and am very grateful for the chance.