Administration Charges

Saga

Dealing with companies nowadays often means having to pay random "administration" fees or charges. Of course it's even worse if they are chasing the customer for money, regardless of the error being of their creation.

Is it legal, when having to deal with a company, especially if complaining or facing poor/no service, to charge THEM a reasonable administration charge, say, based on your hourly equivalent pay. So, if it takes an hour-and-a-half to go through historic paperwork and draft a letter/email I can charge 1.5 hours' worth of my time plus cost of electricity (for email) or electricity, paper, printer ink/toner, stamps, envelopes, petrol and travelling time (for letter)?

Of course, I'm sure 99.9999% of the time they would simply ignore the charge, but if I took it to a smalls claim court would it be upheld?

IAmWales

You'd need to have agreed such a charge when you negotiated the contract with you.

Some companies will offer an amount as a goodwilo gesture, but that's generally achieved through polite conversation, not sending pretend invoices.

bris

If they have breached a contract then they are liable for consequential losses, this only includes time if you need to take time off because of their breach.


If you are just complaining because of poor service then is there a breach of contract? No way to tell what your rights are as the post is cryptic and tells us nothing about your problem.

steampowered

Where money is owed by a business to another business, businesses can charge fixed late payment fees. See Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.

If you are a consumer chasing a business, you cannot make an administration charge I'm afraid. No legal basis for it.

However, you are entitled to charge interest. Unless a contrary rate is agreed, the court would typically award 8%.

The other thing you can do - in situations where you keep getting chased for money you do not owe and the company refuses to rectify the situation - is sue the company for damages under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Read this.

eddddy

Saga wrote: »

Dealing with companies nowadays often means having to pay random "administration" fees or charges.
...

That would be because you agreed to pay those administration fees.

There would be a term in the contract that you entered into, that stated that those fees were payable by you.

So some options open to you would include:

• Refuse to enter into the contract because you don't like the admin fees

• Negotiate to get the terms relating to admin fees removed from the contract

• Accept the terms relating to admin fees, and pay them accordingly

• Negotiate to get new terms added to the contract, which allowed you to charge admin fees

Edit to add...

But, of course, unless you are a very important customer - businesses with large numbers of customers like banks, insurance companies, utilities companies, etc, are very unlikely to agree to amending their standard contract terms just for you.