Taxi driver wins back late payment fees

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"A Liverpool taxi driver, Mike Parry, has successfully challenged late payment fees charged on a loan.

A court in Liverpool has forced Close Premium Finance to repay him £502, including interest and costs.

Close had charged him an extra £30, on eight occasions, when he failed to make his regular repayments to the firm.

Close said it believed the court's decision was "founded on an administrative error" and would try to get the decision set aside.

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Is your bank taking away your subsistence money?

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This FAQ is about what you can do if your bank is levying charges against you leaving you without enough money to house yourself, feed yourself, keep yourself warm or to go to work.

Q. Did you say go to work? I thought that you could only protect benefits payments or tax credits from the bank.
A. It seems that any money which is needed to subsist can be protected from your bank. Your bank probably knows this but of course they won’t have told you. More about this below.

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FAQ - How do I reclaim my bank charges if they have been misrepresented

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Q.. How do I reclaim my charges since the OFT Test Case?

A. Firstly, read the articles at The Bank Charges Decision -Where to now and at .FAQ - The New Bank Charges Position

Make sure that you understand them

Q. Ok I’ve read the articles. What do I have to do?

A. You will need to have written evidence such as Terms & Conditions or correspondence from your bank or court documents filed by your bank in which they represent their charges as reflecting their administrative losses or else being proportionate or as being fair and reasonable.

It is not worth beginning your claim unless you have collected this evidence.

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Not all charges are Bank Charges - so claim them back

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This article explains why the bar on bank charges claims is limited only to charges by banks and provides an example of an argument which could be used to resist a strikeout of a charges claim.

This also applies to other industries such as mobile phone providers or insurers and also to mortgage late-payment fees.

NewsFlash - Finance Company Late Payment fees refunded - here

During the Stay, lots of people had claims against loan companies and other non-current account providers suspended by the courts as well.

Since the Supreme Court decision, we are starting to see some of these claims being struck out by the courts - either on the courts own initiative or on the application of the defendant.

The basis for the strikeout is the result of the OFT test case in the Supreme Court.

However, there seems to me to be no basis for non-pca providers to claim that the Supreme Court decision applies to them.

The Supreme Court held in favour of the banks because charges are used to cross subsidise so-called "free banking" provided for customers in credit.
The Supreme Court accepted in their judgment that banks derive 30% of their revenue from charges and that therefore, charges are part of the banks' core business.
Reg.6 UTCCR on unfair charges applies only to charges which are levied in respect of business which is incidental to the banks' core business.

It is highly unlikely that late payment charges form a core segment of loan companies total revenue.
In that case the loan companies and other companies which levy this high rate of charges are not able to benefit from the Supreme Court judgment.

If you have a stayed claim against a loan company - or

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FAQ - The New Bank Charges Position

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After a rethink and having come through a pessimistic period about bank charges, it seems that there may well be a chance of recovering historical bank charges more easliy than I had first imagined.

In line with my other article, Bank charges - where to now, it is necessary to prove some unfairness. But it has occurred to me that probably most of the banks have misrepresented their charges in some way.

Certainly none of the banks have ever admitted before that they earn 30% of their current account revenue from bank charges and that this revenue is used to cross-subsidise "free-banking" for others.

However, the banks did make this admission in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court accepted this and it was for this reason that the banks won their case.

However, it may be possible to turn the tables. It is the fact of this Supreme Court admission which finally and definitively gives the lie to all of the banks' earlier justifications that their charges were reasonable or that they merely represented their administrative costs.

The banks cannot go back on this admission. To do so would be to admit perjury.

They may now be required to be obliged to explain why they they didn't tell this truth to their customers in the first place.

Got questions? -- Here are the FAQs

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The Bank Charges decision - where to now.

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However - please also read this new developement:-

Bank charges - important new development

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The Supreme Court bank charges decision in November 2009 effectively blocked the Consumer Bank Charges Revolution which was started in January 2006.
The Supreme Court's decision made it clear that the unfairness -- or otherwise -- on its own, of bank charges was not a ground for challenging their validity and for claiming reimbursement.
The Supreme Court said that the reason for this was that as bank charges apparently have become part of the UK banking industry's core business, they did not fall to be assessed for fairness under Regulation six of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations by the OFT or by the courts.

(However, if your charges come from a loan company or some other non-current account provider/bank - then you may be able to claim your charges -see here)

However, the Supreme Court threw in a teaser: that their judgement did not necessarily block the way for bank charges refunds. The Court said that there were other avenues which could be explored under Regulation five of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations.

Since then there has been an enormous amount of discussion as to how claims for bank charges refunds under Regulation five might successfully be made.
Regulation five deals with the quality of the supplier/consumer relationship. Regulation five is not directly concerned with the fairness of the bank charges. Regulation five is more concerned with the fairness of the circumstances in which the bank charges have been applied.
It should also be pointed out that Regulation five is not only concerned with bank charges. Regulation five refers to any term of any consumer contract which is imposed unfairly

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