Alex Harries's diary

Following the latest on bank charges is becoming a tiny bit of a hobby for me now as - in common with millions of other customers - my bank takes more and more of my money in penalty charges to cover their "costs".

If you've read much of my blog, you might have spotted that a lot of my charges come from one charge taking me over my overdraft limit, with more charges piled on top to add insult to injury. Again, this is a common problem for lots of bank customers.

In the news today, I spotted this story about Lloyds TSB being accused by a judge of timewasting behaviour - not the first time such tactics have been used by the banks according to the BBC's article - and another story involving my personal favourite bank, the Alliance & Leicester (not that I ever write about their poor service or anything... ahem) tacitly admitting their charges should only be around the £4.50 mark at the most.

Not that being relieved of my money by a faceless and rude company of questionable competence irks me at all - I'm a Zen-like centre of calm and love today. Ok, I'm lying again... ;o)

Have a good weekend! /al - skyving coursework. Again.

In the latest of the virtually unbroken series of embarrassing defeats for banks being pursued through the courts by customers sick of being hit with penalty charges - decreed as "unlawful" by OFCOM - Natwest bank has repaid £35,988 to an anonymous customer whose small business was hit with the charges.

• Find out more at BBC News

In a related development, a number of people, including the administrator of the Consumer Action Group forums - one of the most powerful community groups challenging the UK banks now - have suggested that the 6 year limit should no longer apply. This limit - the maximum period of time bank charges could be reclaimed within - apparently no longer applies, according to several people far cleverer than I am, who know how to quote facts and figures and other things.

• You can find out more, here

... Not that I consider some areas of the retail banking industry to be one of the most greedy*, incompetent and ignorant groups of numpties to ever grace this country - oh no.

Ok, I do.

Fancy some more proof? Try this ("Are Penalty Charges Bank Robbery?"), and this (video - "The Money Progamme investigates bank charges") from the BBC.

Grumpy luv /al

* Well, how else do you justify £190 in charges in a month where I'm paid £280, for two bounced payments of £15 and £50?! 

I've written - no, ranted - before about how embarrassingly poor the Alliance and Leicester website is, when their badly-designed personal banking website managed to cost me a lot of money in penalty charges.

Checking my balance tonight (ok, I'm waiting for my student loan to come in so I can pay off some debts and, err, maybe spend some of it on a posh widescreen telly. Maybe...) I noticed an advert-style link at the bottom of the banking website. Apart from anything else, this position is one of the worst places to tuck important information as advert blindness tends to set in for anything placed in this part of a web page.

I'm a cynical git by nature - when I'm not off upsetting people, being embarrasingly drunk, or just being plain embarrassing - and decided to see what wonderous information the A&L were going to provide its customers that one can't already find out by reading any number of existing - and respected - websites (for example here, here, here, here ... etc).

The first thing to annoy me when I clicked the link was that it opened a new window. Not a major issue for most people, maybe, but I consider it bad manners to start popping up new windows on your visitors' computers unless you have a very good reason to do so.

The second annoyance - and this is the point where I decided I had to write a ranty blog entry about this - was the completely gratuitous 2-step entry process - first I was shown a picture of a safe, with some text fading in and finally a "[click here to] enter" link appearing in the middle of the safe's combination dial thingy:

... followed by an equally gratuitous animation of the safe opening:

... and after a few seconds, you're presented with this completely Flash-based website:

Very pretty, lovely... Just one question - why has someone gone to all the trouble to pay - probably a lot of money - to have a Flash website developed to do this, when a plain, boring - but just as pretty - HTML website would have done *exactly* the same job, been a lot cheaper to develop and bug-test, loaded faster, provided a much higher level of accessibility and user friendliness, and would (eventually) have found it's way into the Google indexes??

However, I ought to balance this argument out a little - the information in the site isn't completely crap, although it's extremely basic and does little to help people make use of the myriad free anti-virus and anti-spyware tools available on the net. Oh, and there's also a link to the security centre on the A&L online banking log-in page:

(Off-topic. Again. Wonder when I'll ever do some work...? ;o) ) 

I mentioned earlier that I was planning to chase my old bank to recover several years' worth of bank charges since an Office of Fair Trading report concluded that all charges over £12 were illegal.

The BBC News website has now run a story covering the growing movement of people who are taking their banks to court to reclaim their bank charges and, much more interestingly, they have also proved a "how-to" guide (including template letters) to reclaiming bank charges.

In a nutshell, the process goes something like this:

• You send a Data Protection Access letter to your bank by recorded, demanding all your bank statements for the last 6 years. You enclose a £10 fee, and the bank has 40 days from the date your letter is signed for.
• After you receive your statements (which usually takes 41-ish days, according to most of the reports from successful claimants), you calculate all the charges your bank has applied - bounced payment charges, unauthorised overdraft charges, etc - and list each one in a spreadsheet.
• Print this list of charges (your "Schedule of Charges"), and sent it - along with a "Letter Before Action" - to the bank, which warns them that you are demanding all your charges back, and will issue a Small Claims Court action in 14 days if they don't comply.
• The bank will normally reply with a partial settlement offer - this is usually only a fraction of your amount (an example recently was a settlement offer of £45 for a claim of £3,300. They won the full amount back without having to go to court). You can either accept the partial settlement - which usually includes an (illegal) clause which tries to stop you later claiming more charges back - or you can send them a reply which politely tells them you'll be continuing with your court action.
• You will probably also have to issue proceedings in the small claims court, which costs up to £120 (you can claim this back) before the bank pays up.
• Eventually - usually after a period of around 2 1/2 months - your bank should pay out. Go celebrate!

Most advice websites - including discussion forums where more experienced members assist people to make their claims - recommend accepting offers above 90%.

More and more banks are now delaying until the court papers have been issued before paying up but, to date, I haven't heard of a bank going to court because, as the BBC News article mentions, the banks know that they cannot substantiate charging £45 just because someone's gone 50p over their overdraft limits.

It's important to stress that, although there is a huge amount of help for every step of the way, and everyone from laywers to numpties like me can do it without a solicitor's help, the process does involve the threat of court action and there is a remote chance you'll end up having to fight your claim in court. Don't panic, but do remember it.

If you want more help, you could do worse than to sign up on this community forum (consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forums) - as there are thousands of people on there who have either claimed successfully, or are going through their claims now.

If you do decide to go after your bank, good luck :o) /al

Useful weblinks:

• BBC News article on bank charges
• BBC News guide to reclaiming bank charges
• Consumer Action Group discussion forums - include...
  
  About 75 more words in this entry

(Off topic fun. Isn't it always these days?)

I've just been reminded by a friend that you can apply to reclaim any bank charges you've had in the last 6 years. For example, a direct debit for £15 was bounced recently because I had only £14.12 in my account (yup, I was 88p short). For that I was charged £27 for bouncing the charge, £30 for an unauthorised overdraft (caused by the £27 charge), and then charged a further £30 the next day for not repaying my unauthorised overdraft.

To recap: that's £87 of charges for being 88p short. To add insult to injury, the reason I didn't have enough in the bank in the first place was my bank's shiny new online banking website which displayed my bank balance, recent charges, a block of text and a nice, shiny, flashing advert all on top of each other. (If that's the level of ability of their webteam, maybe I should apply to them for a McJobbidge? ;o).

A lot of information and advice is available online - a quick Google search turned up www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk near the top of the results, and there's a lot of information on there to get started on reclaiming your charges. ThisIsMoney also has a good feature on it.

In short, what you normally do is:

• Send a form letter to your bank requesting your bank statements and details of any charges applied (you can get up to 6 years' worth in England and Wales, or 5 years' in Scotland). Normally they have 40 days to reply.
  
  
• Once you receive the statements, total up your charges and send a second form letter - with the total amount of these charges plus any other bits and bobs (the information is provided online) - and send it back. This shouldn't take more than 14 days I think?
  
  
• In an ideal world, you should then get either a settlement offer back from the bank, confirmation of a refund for all your charges, or confirmation that they're going to investigate your complaint. It's important that you read all the information you can get your hands on throughout this procedure to make sure you're doing everything the right way!

Think I'll be starting to do some maths tomorrow. A bit of mental artithmetic comes up to a figure of £bloody hell for me... ;o)

Couple of points:

• The whole process can be completed within 80 days, depending on your bank's level of cooperation.
• This might also be suitable for credit cards, or if it's not, being able to claim credit card charges back is something that's definitely in the pipeline.
  
• You can get (usually free) independent advice from the Citizen's Advice Bureau, or (normally) paid advice from a solicitor, financial adviser, or another suitable professional - this is never a bad idea so you can make sure everything you're doing is correct and above board.

Disclaimer: I'm not a financial adviser. Hell, you shouldn't even be listening to me, so it's up to you to figure out if the information contained in here is useful to you and accurate. Please don't sue me if it all goes horribly wrong - although it shouldn't - 'cos I can't afford it!