Barclays

Slattiboo2

I have recently been offered a financial settlement from Barclays finance for a mis sold loan on a RHI biomass heating system. This system has been deemed inappropriate for my house so the loan by Barclays is classed as mis sold .
Should I except their first offer or could I, should I ask for more ? 
Be interesting to see if anyone else is in this situation. 
Thanks in advance x

CliveOfIndia

More details required in order to even start to give meaningful advice.

But, the very first question would be, who has this offer come from ?  It may be legitimate, but there are an awful lot of scams circulating for all sorts of things.

Has the offer come from Barclays themselves (if it appears to be from Barclays, have you done all the usual checks to verify that it's genuine) ?  Is it a third-party ambulance-chaser firm ?

Was this a text, an email, a hard-copy letter through the letterbox?

If you can supply more details then it may be possible to offer some advice.

Even if it's genuine, and even if you are legitimately entitled to some some of payout, I'd be very wary of engaging any third-party "no win no fee" type of outfit.  They don't do anything more than you can easily do yourself, and will take a hefty cut of any payment you receive.  And you can't back out midway once you've agreed to engage them, at least not without financial penalty.

DullGreyGuy

Slattiboo2 said:

I have recently been offered a financial settlement from Barclays finance for a mis sold loan on a RHI biomass heating system. This system has been deemed inappropriate for my house so the loan by Barclays is classed as mis sold .
Should I except their first offer or could I, should I ask for more ? 
Be interesting to see if anyone else is in this situation. 

The scenario doesn't make sense. 

Barclays dont sell heating systems and certainly wouldn't consider if such a heating system is suitable or not for a property. 

At a guess it sounds like you have made a S75 complaint to Barclays as the provider of linked finance (or you paid it on CC) about the miss selling of the system rather than the loan. 

What's the situation with the heating? Still in the property? Been replaced with something else? Did whoever "deemed" it was inappropriate not suggest what the most appropriate resolution was?

Slattiboo2

I signed up to the governments renewable heating initiative (RHI). 
We had a biomass system installed which cost around £20000. The load was through Barclays. The system had lots of faults and the company that fitted it in 2016 went bust the first year it was installed. 
Any RHI payments we received from the government had to be used for repairs and fuel.
Around June this year a company called Qure group contacted me on behalf of Barclays finance to say they have been asked by Barclays to investigate biomass systems that were installed using Barclays loans. 
Qure group reported to Barclays that my system was a bad install and should not have been used .
The loan was classed as mis sold and Barclays have offered us £16000 to install an alternative heating system. 
Could I, should I ask for more . 
The system completely failed October last year so this is my second winter without heating. 
Any advice much appreciated.

Spies

Take it and use it towards a heatpump install, I assume you can qualify for the BUS grant also

Reed_Richards

I have heard of solar panels being mis-sold in conjunction with a loan from Barclays and Barclays eventually having to pay compensation.  So although some others here are sceptical, this could be quite genuine.  Or I suppose it could be a scam based on something similar that happened in the past.     

Disneygirl08

I am the OP's wife.  Barclays are taking responsibility as they provided the loan.  We did not contact them they contacted us as they were investigating the selling of the loans through the energy company that sold us the system.  Having completed several questionnaires they eventually sent out someone to inspect the installation and they have concluded it was not fit for purpose and so Barclays have made us an offer. 

The offer is a 'basic refund' of the loan amount minus the RHI payments we received and 'compensatory interest ' at a rate of 8%.

My understanding is that the compensatory interest is to cover what we could have got had we kept the money we paid out.

Our dilemma is, having previously made a bad decision in signing up to the installation of the Biomass boiler we do not want to rush into another bad decision and would appreciate some opinions and advice on if we should accept this offer from Barclays.

I feel there is no compensation for the actual miss selling or the hassel/stress resulting from having a bad system that needed more maintenance than it should have. We have not had a working central heating system for over a year now.

Also as we are now trying to decide what heating system to install (which is also a daunting decision) we are not eligible for the government grant associated with new air source heating pump systems as we already used the RHI scheme (which obviously we have not really benefitted from).

So basically we want advice on if we should accept the offer or try for more, and how to do that and also if anyone has any advice on what kind of system we should install that would be great.  We cannot have gas as it is not available in our village, we currently have radiators and a hot water cylinder but no boiler as the Biomass unit is the boiler and it is totally broken.

Any help please

QrizB

Disneygirl08 said:

So basically we want advice on if we should accept the offer or try for more, and how to do that

How much have they offered you?

Do you any reason to think this is unreasonably low, and that you've any realistic chance of negotiating a bigger sum?

Disneygirl08 said:

... if anyone has any advice on what kind of system we should install that would be great.  We cannot have gas as it is not available in our village, we currently have radiators and a hot water cylinder but no boiler as the Biomass unit is the boiler and it is totally broken.

You could look at a heat pump, but (unlike Spies' post above) you might not qualify for the £7.5k Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant since you don't currently have a fossil fuel heating system.
If your pockets aren't deep enough for a heat pump, perhaps a Tepeo heat battery plus a time-of-use electricity tariff would work for you?

https://www.tepeo.com/the-zeb/ (although a bit of Googling suggests that would be almost £9k, still not cheap).

The other mainstream option is storage heaters, but it seems a shame to lose the benefits of a wet CH system.

I've not mentioned air-to-air multi-splits, since they're a bit unconventional, but that might also be an option?

Edit to add:

Unless you're made of money (a distant Rockerfeller heir, or you received 10,000 Bitcoin in exchange for a pizza back in 2010) don't even think about an "electric combi boiler". It's one of the worst options out there as far as running costs go.

DullGreyGuy

Disneygirl08 said:

The offer is a 'basic refund' of the loan amount minus the RHI payments we received and 'compensatory interest ' at a rate of 8%.

My understanding is that the compensatory interest is to cover what we could have got had we kept the money we paid out.

Statutory interest is 8% simple interest (ie you dont get interest on the interest) which is awarded on damages were you to go to court. The financial ombudsman apply the same statutory interest on awards. Barclays are therefore just mirroring what the other dispute resolution channels would give. 

In a B2B/commercial world its 8% + BoE Base Rate unless a contract stipulates something else. 

Its not changed very often at all so trying to justify why its one percentage or another but its set in legislation and is broadly intended to consider the losses sustained for not having had the money at the time you should have had it. Also makes it nice and simple maths.

Reed_Richards

Apart from the financial aspects of trying to get Barclays to improve their offer, you should consider whether this would be worth the time and trouble it would take.

matelodave

There is always the potential pitfall that as Barclays seem to want to sort out a clean and easy end to this matter as I suspect you do as well, they could easily withdraw the offer if they end up in a protracted argument or even court case.

In which case it could start to cost you money especially if you decide to try and escalate the claim and end up having to consult a solicitor. There is no guarantee that that Barclays would improve their offer or that going to the ombudsman would get it increased.

In fact there's the distinct possibility that any award could be less than the offer that you've already received.

You get lots of well meaning suggestions from the forums but as very few are legally qualified are you willing to gamble the offer that you have against guesses or opinions from forumites who don't stand to lose money if it goes wrong.

Personally I'd accept the offer and move forward unless you want the possibility of ongoing grief with no guarantee of success

Just my opinion you understand, but probably just as valid as some of the other suggestions.

Hopefully the rest of the system (radiators, plumbing, hot water tank etc) is capable of supporting a heatpump in which case you have a grand or two's worth of kit already installed which should be fairly simple to adapt to a heat pump. Although you'd need specialist advice