Admitted: Halifax hike the minimum contractual payment when you enter a payment plan

restalla

About 18 months ago, i was unfairly dismissed from my job. I got some money which began to run out around April of 2013. About the same time, I finaly got a job offer so just needed short term help while I got back on top of things.

I approached all the people I owed money to and almost all were fine and arranged payment breaks/ plans.

One of those companies was Halifax. I'm not going to fully go into the total mess that followed, contradicting letters, harrassing phone calls, lies etc, but Halifax offered a payment plan on the credit card.

After a couple of months, I began getting calls telling me I owed £x amount. I told them it was wrong, but the calls kept coming, and in August I got a notice telling me I had to pay £200 ish to avoid getting a default.

I knew the figure was wrong, but as I was back in work, paid it and upped my payments. I made a complaint and did a SAR to try to get to the bottom of the problem.

I realised that although my original minimum payment was 1%, when I went into the plan, this seemed to have gone up to 2%.

Various excuses were offered, such as it was always 2% (it wasn't) and that as I had been a month behind it had added the 1% for the current and previous month (again, not true as the arrears was listed separately).

I said that I think the "system" was set up so that people on a payment plan had their minimum set at 2%. This is important as, although the bank might be accepting lower payments, the arrears will increase by the difference between your payment and your minimum contract payment. If the minimum payment increases, the amount of arrears will increase. As the trigger point for a default notice is based on the amount of arrears, eventually, you could end up with a default on your credit file even if you didn't actually owe that amount of money.

It also makes things worse for the customer, rather than helping them.

As soon as I made that claim, Halifax clammed up. The SAR was ignored, despite asking by letter, phone and email and complaints were ignored, even when sending them to the office of the CEO.

Eventually, in November, having sent numerous letters and emails, I contacted the ICO and the Ombudsman, both of which wrote to Halifax. All of a sudden, I got a response (though they still havent sent copies of all the documents and its quite clear they don't want to), but last week they finally admitted that the minimum had increased to 2% as a result of going into a payment plan.

They have offered some compensation and things are not yet fully resolved as there is quite a lot more to the story, but the point of this post is that anyone who has been on a payment plan with Halifax and had a minimum payment of less than 2% should check what they have been charged.

You should also check what Halifax reported to the credit reference agencies as it is possible you were shown in arrears when you weren't.

Especially important is for any customers who ended up getting a default as this is likely to be defective.

Apologies if I've put this post in the wrong section.