Bank Charges Test Case Article discussion

seaskye

Hello everyone,
I sent my claim to Barclays by recorded delivery quite some time ago now, and though I know it was delivered they have never responded at all. What should I do now?
My account was overdrawn, but due to payoffice error my salary was paid in after I opened a parachute account and Barclays wouldn't give it back - so my overdraft was cleared but I had to have an advance from my company to cover the amount, still can't believe they penalised me for their mistake! But now my debt is with them not the bank, so I suppose Barclays have no reason not to pay my claim now, since the overdraft is cleared.
But do I chase them to respond to my claim letter or what?

Any help/advice will be most gratefully received.

newreclaimer

In wednesdays Money Mail, the Last Word by Tony Hazell points out exactly why the banks are already not 'free' and explains why they wont charge for having an account.
Id put a link to it if I could find it and work out how to do it off their site! But I cant!

Tim_L

johnny_storm wrote: »

Im not in favour of anything that costs me more money yet has no benefit to me.

I wonder if next year Martin will launch a campaign for people to reclaim their speeding tickets, then road tax goes up by £150. The principle is EXACTLY the same.

Complete rubbish. Speeding fines punish criminal offences, bank charges come under civil law. Courts have the power to impose penalties, private companies do not, but they can reclaim reasonable costs from someone in default of an agreement. It's really as simple as that.

There is a simple way to make money from people in debt, which is to charge interest. Unfortunately this wasn't enough for the banks, presumably because people weren't in enough debt, and hence the absurd level of charging. They'd probably have got away with it had they not raised the charges to absolutely ridiculous levels.

Free banking won't end. There are too many banks chasing market share. You may see some attempt to charge on the back of this judgement from bigger banks, because it gives convenient scapegoats and has been widely publicised, but there will be ways out of it - open a savings account, take an insurance product, whatever. You may see some standard benefits, for example visa debit, pushed up into the premium service bracket to induce people to take them up. But it will be easy to avoid charges.

But even if it weren't, what on earth is wrong with debtors being charged interest plus costs for their borrowing, and people with bank accounts being charged what it costs to run them? I really fail to see why this is a problem.

joanne32

i would like to know if iam entiled to my money back iam banking with natwest and last week they took 38.00 pounds from my bank for an unpaid direct debit for 7.97 they will not give me my money back as they said it is under the terms and conditions i thought that no bank can charge you anything under 10.00 pounds is this rite thanks

Tozer

williamh1 wrote: »

Last year I made a claim and was offered and accepted about an 80% refund of the bank's charges. Should the OFT decide in customers' favour would I be able to reclaim the remaining 20%?

Not if you accepted in full and final settlement.

shabs4

Hi Everyone!!
Hope someone can answer my question: I had a letter from my bank 2day after sending them a letter 2 reclaim my charges & they sent me a budget planner 2 help me sort my money out!! They also advised me 2 seek debt councelling:mad: !! I was only in debt cos they kept charging me!! Is my case still goin 2 b dealt wiv or have they brushed me aside & think thats all they have 2 do 2 deal wiv me? Im a single mum on benefits & cant afford 2 keep being charged!! Dont know wot 2 do now, please help

Smasher

The bit I find really cute is the letters we all got when bankers abandoned the old "charges to cover our admin costs" and introduced new "arrangement service fees".

So you got a letter from your bank to say. Here are your new T&Cs, we have introduced a bunch of new services for which we will charge extortionately high prices. You do not get a choice in whether you want to use these services or not, it is not negotiable. By the way, we have charged you £120 so far this month for using this new service.

Can you imagine getting a letter like that from say your mobile phone supplier? Here are your new T&Cs, we've introduced a new service with immediate effect. Previously, when you called more than your monthly limit of 200 mins we charged 20p per minute. Now we have new "extra minutes arrangement fees". It is £35 for anything over your agreed monthly minutes and another £30 for each call you make. Your bill this month is an extra £120.
Have a nice day. :laugh:

mama67

We had some accounts with Lloyds which went into default, we raised monies to pay off debts and made a "full and final settlement " payment to Lloyds of obviously a reduced amount.

Can we claim the unlawful charges added to these accounts during the last 6 years???

Have got some statements and the charges on those add up and this only for 1 year.

TIA

Smasher

alexjohnson wrote: »

Well it would seriously pee you off! But you could chose to terminate your contract (move bank). If all the mobile phone suppliers chose to follow suit you could expect intervention from Ofcom (read the OFT).

So let's think about this. Some people would study this letter, be pee'd off, and if they didn't want to change supplier would make damn sure they stuck within the 200 minutes. But if they only used 100 minutes anyway they might not care or be quite happy with things as they were, and that one time the car broke down and they needed to call the AA and spent ages on hold, well that's just bad luck, and they'd be glad that at least they had a phone at all: that's what these things are for after all. The people who knew they had a dodgy car all-too likely to break down necessitating lengthy phone calls might decide that they'd be better off paying a bit more for a tariff with more minutes.

Some other people wouldn't give it a second thought, blab away on the top deck of the bus about nothing in general for hours at a time, not notice when the first few bills went out, and then finally catch up some months later when they realised they had a lot less money than they thought they did. At this point some of them would feel very stupid and vow to be more careful. They would then move into the first group. If they had any sense they would also seriously think about moving mobile phone companies as clearly the one they were with was not working well for them. Some would not, and just whinge. (And in fairness some people would live in a dodgy coverage area and not be able to. There wouldn't be many of these people as coverage is pretty good, but they would exist.)

Some though would bleat about how all this was "unfair" and how they absolutely "needed" to make those calls. When some of the people who were merely pee'd off had the cheek to point out they should have seen this coming, you could expect a chorus of righteous indignation about how they positively "had" to speak to little Jimmy, who dare they tell someone who they should or should not be speaking to, etc. You can also imagine that they would positively relish the stories of people with arthritis who thought they'd pressed the red button to hang up, but hadn't, so ringing up ruinous phone calls. These little old ladies with arthritis would be very small in number compared with the top-deck-gassers, but the latter would cloak themselves in the injustice done to the former, which would make them feel good rather than stupid, but this would enrage the people who had been smart enough to read the letter from the mobile phone company, and could see hypocricy when it poked them in the face. (The little old ladies would also demand refunds, and it would be a poor show if the mobile phone company piled on misery. Some of them spoke to sympatetic people at the call centre in Bangalore who refunded the money. These little old ladies decided that maybe phones weren't for them. Some spoke to very unsympathetic people and in the long run this wasn't going to win any friends for the mobile phonce cmpany which, as we will see, would eventually need them. They had their mobile phones taken away by bailiffs and it was very sad. While some people pointed out that there weren't many little old ladies with arthritis as a percentage of all the people with mobile phones, it still sucked to be one of them.)

The top-deck-gassers would then demand refunds, which would concern the people who had read the letters as in the meantime the mobile phone company had spent billions on 3G towers and didn't have the money anymore; it was all-too obvious who might have to foot the bill: yes, the people who'd read the letter. They were worried and annoyed. The gassers would then scour the contracts looking for any way out of bills the mobile phone company had told them quite plainly it was going to charge them in a glossy leaflet which had even got a little diamond on the back from the Plain English Campaign. This would all get very complicated and people who were not experts either in how mobile phones work or how lawyers work would convince themselves they were, by carefully reading the instruction manual that came with the phone until they could recite it from memory. The mobile phone company would make refunds to a lot of these people for reasons which seemed good at the start but quickly snowballed out if its control, but this would only serve to reinforce the moral outrage of the gassers who could smell the blood in the water. Some of them would convince themselves their campaign was up there with the cure for cancer as a humanitarian goal. The already peeved people who'd read the letter in the first place would be even more enraged by this than they were before. They would be accused of being very uncaring. This would go down like a lead balloon. No one was enjoying using their mobile phone very much anymore.

In the end, most people would recognise that right or wrong, this was a shoddy way to run a business. They would find it very unfortunate that civil servants were going to decide what was a suitable tariff for mobile phone calls as they would know civil servants have a poor track record in this kind of thing and everyone would likely get an inferior tariff. As the people who'd read the letter either had been happy with the tariff as it was, or had moved elsewhere, they wondered quite why this had had to happen. They would be annoyed that the plight of the arthritic grannies had been hijacked by the top-deck-gassers. But everyone involved would agree that the mobile phone company probably had it coming.

The end.

Glad you got that off your chest! Now, the gas, electricity, broadband, satellite TV & water companies then all introduced fees for similar arrangement services. I want an essay for each please.

newreclaimer

alexjohnson wrote: »

Well it would seriously pee you off! But you could chose to terminate your contract (move bank). If all the mobile phone suppliers chose to follow suit you could expect intervention from Ofcom (read the OFT).

So let's think about this. Some people would study this letter, be pee'd off, and if they didn't want to change supplier would make damn sure they stuck within the 200 minutes. But if they only used 100 minutes anyway they might not care or be quite happy with things as they were, and that one time the car broke down and they needed to call the AA and spent ages on hold, well that's just bad luck, and they'd be glad that at least they had a phone at all: that's what these things are for after all. The people who knew they had a dodgy car all-too likely to break down necessitating lengthy phone calls might decide that they'd be better off paying a bit more for a tariff with more minutes.

Some other people wouldn't give it a second thought, blab away on the top deck of the bus about nothing in general for hours at a time, not notice when the first few bills went out, and then finally catch up some months later when they realised they had a lot less money than they thought they did. At this point some of them would feel very stupid and vow to be more careful. They would then move into the first group. If they had any sense they would also seriously think about moving mobile phone companies as clearly the one they were with was not working well for them. Some would not, and just whinge. (And in fairness some people would live in a dodgy coverage area and not be able to. There wouldn't be many of these people as coverage is pretty good, but they would exist.)

Some though would bleat about how all this was "unfair" and how they absolutely "needed" to make those calls. When some of the people who were merely pee'd off had the cheek to point out they should have seen this coming, you could expect a chorus of righteous indignation about how they positively "had" to speak to little Jimmy, who dare they tell someone who they should or should not be speaking to, etc. You can also imagine that they would positively relish the stories of people with arthritis who thought they'd pressed the red button to hang up, but hadn't, so ringing up ruinous phone calls. These little old ladies with arthritis would be very small in number compared with the top-deck-gassers, but the latter would cloak themselves in the injustice done to the former, which would make them feel good rather than stupid, but this would enrage the people who had been smart enough to read the letter from the mobile phone company, and could see hypocricy when it poked them in the face. (The little old ladies would also demand refunds, and it would be a poor show if the mobile phone company piled on misery. Some of them spoke to sympatetic people at the call centre in Bangalore who refunded the money. These little old ladies decided that maybe phones weren't for them. Some spoke to very unsympathetic people and in the long run this wasn't going to win any friends for the mobile phonce cmpany which, as we will see, would eventually need them. They had their mobile phones taken away by bailiffs and it was very sad. While some people pointed out that there weren't many little old ladies with arthritis as a percentage of all the people with mobile phones, it still sucked to be one of them.)

The top-deck-gassers would then demand refunds, which would concern the people who had read the letters as in the meantime the mobile phone company had spent billions on 3G towers and didn't have the money anymore; it was all-too obvious who might have to foot the bill: yes, the people who'd read the letter. They were worried and annoyed. The gassers would then scour the contracts looking for any way out of bills the mobile phone company had told them quite plainly it was going to charge them in a glossy leaflet which had even got a little diamond on the back from the Plain English Campaign. This would all get very complicated and people who were not experts either in how mobile phones work or how lawyers work would convince themselves they were, by carefully reading the instruction manual that came with the phone until they could recite it from memory. The mobile phone company would make refunds to a lot of these people for reasons which seemed good at the start but quickly snowballed out if its control, but this would only serve to reinforce the moral outrage of the gassers who could smell the blood in the water. Some of them would convince themselves their campaign was up there with the cure for cancer as a humanitarian goal. The already peeved people who'd read the letter in the first place would be even more enraged by this than they were before. They would be accused of being very uncaring. This would go down like a lead balloon. No one was enjoying using their mobile phone very much anymore.

In the end, most people would recognise that right or wrong, this was a shoddy way to run a business. They would find it very unfortunate that civil servants were going to decide what was a suitable tariff for mobile phone calls as they would know civil servants have a poor track record in this kind of thing and everyone would likely get an inferior tariff. As the people who'd read the letter either had been happy with the tariff as it was, or had moved elsewhere, they wondered quite why this had had to happen. They would be annoyed that the plight of the arthritic grannies had been hijacked by the top-deck-gassers. But everyone involved would agree that the mobile phone company probably had it coming.

The end.

Alex,

I think youve got too much time on your hands.