PPI claim firm not billed us for succesful claim (yet!)

LoidPhil

Against my better advice, my wife signed up to a PPI claims firm to pursue claims against several financial institutions.

Having heard nothing for the first 3 months, out of the blue she received a letter directly from M&S finance asking her to confirm her maiden name and previous address. Shortly after responding she received an offer letter from M&S for circa £1500, which was duly accepted, and a cheque was received (again directly from M&S) not long thereafter.

Although the claims firm had been mostly circumnavigated, I advised my wife to let them know of the outcome. She did and they asked her to send them a copy of the letter from M&S confirming the amount of the refund, which she did. That was over 4 months ago and still we haven't been billed for the amount.

My wife is quite content just to hold out until they get in touch. She fully intends to settle the claim firm's bill when it surfaces, but I think she now sees how easy it would've been to do this all herself and is a bit miffed at the fact of having to give up the best part of £500 to a company who probably only sent one initial letter (the rest of the contact was directly between my wife and M&S). I, on the other hand, am slightly more cautious and would prefer for her to chase them and ask what the hold up is because we want to pay the bill before we spend the money - we only sent the information to them by standard post so for all we know it got lost in transit. I just have this fear of them turning around in 6 months time and saying that we now owe them an extra £x amount of interest on top of the bill because we failed to chase them for a bill.

I appreciate that this is probably an unfamiliar scenario to all of you, as you wonderful lot will mostly have pursued claims yourselves, but I just wonder if anyone with any kind of legal nouse has a view on whether we should just sit tight or actively pursue the claims firm for a bill?

-taff

Pursue them, because if you forget about it, and they forget about it, and another couple of months go by, she'll want to pay them even less.
Make sure she cancels the contract with them if there's no fee to do so because there's probably a clause saying they can represent her in ALL complaints.

picky123

Wait for the scum to chase you.

Just make sure that you keep the £500 so you can pay the bill when they do chase. Put it in a dormant bank account or buy premium bonds to make sure you are not tempted.

Also make sure it is the full fee. The normally quote a % plus vat, so if your 500 just represents just the quoted % be prepared to add 20% vat on top, so a total of £600.

As the industry contracts, due to no more claimants, they will be after all the cash they can get.

magpiecottage

Put the money into a separate savings account - preferably one that earns a reasonable amount of interest but not one with too much notice required - when you eventually get an invoice you can reckon on needing to pay within 28 days from when it is posted to you.

They have six years from when you received the payment or three years from when they became aware that you owed them money if later to claim it. The six years started when the payment was made and the three years when you sent the letter telling them. So keep evidence of both.