How long do we wait for a CCA from 90's? And can you reclaim any unenforceable payments made?

Osc123

Hi everyone,

So long story short, earlier this year my best friend became unable to work due to a serious accident. She was already in a DMP which quickly became unaffordable so we wrote to her creditors and asked for some support, four out of five were wonderful and bent over backwards to help, but the remaining one (oddly with the lowest and oldest balance) has been an absolute nightmare!

Spent three months getting them to acknowledge her, then spent another two months going round in circles with them over an unsecured debt that dates back to 1995!!!!

Eventually my friend just didn't have the time or the energy to keep on banging her head against a wall, but I wasn't prepared to let it go based on how much success she'd had with the other creditors, so I read up and suggested she asked them to send her a full account statement and a true copy of the CCA she would have signed back in the nineties. They confirm they'll look into it.....

Almost three months past and she'd heard nothing until yesterday, when a letter arrived with pages and pages of payment transactions going back to 2007 (we assume when the last DCA sold the debt on to the current owner) but nothing any further back and it's clearly NOT the CCA that she requested.

However, the wording of their letter very much seems to imply they believe this account statement/transaction list is a CCA and they're asking her to contact them to start up a payment plan again.

It's obviously no proof the debt is enforceable, and she's going to contact them and point this out, but I'm wondering how much longer should she wait for the CCA to be produced? And what can she do about this apparent stalemate?

This DCA is being incredibly difficult to deal with, so the sooner it's resolved one way or the other, the better.


Another friend of ours told me that he recalls a post on this site some years back, about something similar happening to someone who took their creditor to court to get the money they'd paid towards the unenforceable debt back.....

Can anyone tell me how we'd potentially go about claiming back the payments, if it's possible at all....and at what point do you challenge the DCA on the issue of payments?

My friend ultimately isn't counting on getting the money back, she'll just be glad not to have to make the monthly payments anymore, but if it's possible to get them back, I feel it's worth pursuing as it could potentially make a huge difference to her life right now.

Any advice or insight on this would be really helpful and appreciated.
Thanks for reading!

fatbelly

I don't believe that you'd succeed in a claim against the creditor. You are not saying it's not your (friend's) debt but that it is not enforceable in court. That is an important distinction.

Under s77-9 CCA the existing owner can make the debt enforceable by reconstructing the original agreement. Whether they could do that accurately or not remains to be seen.

However, for agreements pre-dating 2007, s127(3) provides a route to 'irredeemable unenforceability' if no agreement was ever signed. If this debt is a 1990s catalogue debt, particularly one from the JD Williams group, this is likely to be the case.

I would not waste money in initiating a court claim on this basis. Just tell the creditor that you will not be making payments to unenforceable debts and leave the ball in their court.

If they want to prove enforceability then they will have to stump up the cash for a court claim and you would defend it.

I doubt that will ever happen.

Rob5342

They word these letters very carefully to imply things to try and cause enough doubt in people mind so they start paying. It's a lot easier to do that then actuallt take legal action. As FatBelly says I'd just tell them you wont be paying anything to unenforcable debts and leave it there.