False RBS arrears claims

So what? Delete it.

Then say you enclose a copy. And send your letter recorded delivery.

OK.

Stop there. The rest of your letter is hopeless and should be deleted.

Add in what exactly you want, eg 'This unwarranted harrassment has to cease immediately. Please confirm by return that it will.'

Complain to the bank, and ask them to escalate the complaint as it has not been resolved correctly in the past. Also explain that you require them to escalate the complaint to ensure your involvement of the ombudsman can be made in a timely manner.

Not sure why you feel this is relevant (or indeed if this is true - have you never had a mortgage for example).

As someone else has said, include a copy of this letter.

Dates of theletters they`ve sent you, amounts they claim you owe them, why they claim you owe them money. All very relevant details.

None of this is at all relevant, apart from possibly making you feel a bit better about letting off steam to the company. The person answering the letter won`t care about your claims, nor will the company as a whole. You also run the risk of coming across as a paranoid nutter, which will make anything else you say a lot less interesting to the bank, and thu less likely to be acted on. Lets be honest, the above does have a hint of tin-foil hat about it, and who can respect, or even care about the opinion of, someone of that kind?

What will you be claiming for exactly? Perhaps if you now inform them that you will be charging them to deal with any and all future mistakes of this kind made by themselves and give a list of REASONABLE charges, you might have a chance of getting money from them in the future. Reasonable is not £25 to read a letter, reasonable would be what you normally charge your employer for your time.

You may be interested in this recent case, where British Gas were sued for harassment:

I grant you that saying so is probably a waste of time, but when the general attitude seems to be that people with relatively minor debts must be pursued even by *former* creditors (who themselves are virtually bankrupt), I wanted to make the point that by reasonable standards I was quite solvent.

Past experience suggests that they may confirm that it will, but not do so. More likely they'll delay another 3 months and then send another phony Arrears notice. Which was why I mentioned Small Claims Court.

That is more or less what I plan to do. After I've cooled down a little and removed from the letter the (at least moderately plausible) suggestions as to why this is happening, which won't sit well with people who are glad that their nice employers are still paying them money.

But the bank's complaints department probably now consists of a spotty kid with a large waste bin, and the ombudspersons will be (a) deluged and (b) told that they must support the banks.

Never in this country until now, and it is small.

I agree; I should remove that part, or at least save it for the inevitable later.

have a hint of >tin-foil hat about it, and who can respect, or even care about the opinion >of, someone of that kind?

I'd say that all of my suggested explanations are things which actually happen, as one can tell by reading the papers. Which one might be correct, in these 'troubled times' as they call them, is impossible for me to know. But I would repeat that if it's happening to me, it will be happening to many others.

In the past various banks have tried to charge 25.00 and even 50.00 when a sudden reduction in overdraft limit put me over limit. And that was some sort of automatic computer response, not involving bank staffs' time until I asked them to cancel it. So I'd say that 25.00 would be quite reasonable if as before I had to phone, find and copy old documentation, write, go to the Post Office to pay for and send a Recorded Delivery letter, and so forth.

But my real point would be to ask the court to order the bank to behave as they should in such a situation. Possibly I'm wrong, but I understood that a Small Claims COurt could make such an order.

My God, they (British Gas) were trying to argue that because they were computer-generated she should not have treated the letters as seriously as if they had come from a person! If they had called in the bailiffs, computer-generated letters would have been what they sent.

I hope she doesn't lose (or has nothing to lose).

It`s not just that the people will be grateful to still have job, as myself and others have said a lot of your claims make you look less than entirely stable mentally - this then damages the impact of ANYTHING else you have to say. Imagine walking down the street and you see a man wearing a sandwich board telling you the world is about to end, that it will be eaten by blue cheese monsters. That person ma well then go on to tell you the truth about life, the universe and everything, but are you going to believe him?

Being in debt isn`t automatically a bad thing if you are sensible about it. Being in debt proves to the banking system that you are able to manage your affairs while you keep on paying your dues. Being in debt to many times your income doesn`t automatically make you a bad credit risk, other things come into it.

I really wouldn`t bother with it - you`re wasting your time. In my experience, the best way to get a result from a bank, or any other large company, is to escalate the complaint as quickly as possible as highly as possible. Tell them what laws they`re breaking with their actions, tell them you intend to involve the ombudsman at the earliest opportunity if they don`t resolve the matter, and tell them what you want them to do to make you go away. If you feel that a promise not to continue sending letters is enough, then ask for that. If you feel that £500 would be fair compensation for the hastle they`ve caused you, then ask for that.

You may argue that all you want, but if I got a letter with those claims in, my first thought would be tin-foil hat nutter, which then means I care very little about anything else you have to say.

I doubt you`d be able to really justify 3 hours to reply to a single letter - you could try, but failing to prove this as an actual cost wouldn`t make anyting else you say look good. Don`t forget that those charges from the banks you`re complaining about are now being challenged, and many banks have brought them down to a more sensible level themselves - how do you fancy your chances at proving your letters cost much more than the banks do, when they have teams of highly paid people to make their point?

AIUI they can make them pay you money, but not much else.

She did win. Sorry I meant to post a link to a report containing the result. See:

The banks have automated systems and ready-made form letters, he hasn't. He has to sit down, think about what he wants to write and write it rather than just select a form letter and maybe add a paragraph. An hour is quite a reasonable length of time for this in my opinion.

Sorry for top posting, the program hasn`t indented your post correctly when I clicked reply.

An hour may be reasonable yes, but three hours would be far more than could be justified.

The banks have automated systems and ready-made form letters, he hasn't. He has to sit down, think about what he wants to write and write it rather than just select a form letter and maybe add a paragraph. An hour is quite a reasonable length of time for this in my opinion.

I would find it hard to complete a satisfactorily worded letter to suit that kind of circumstance in less than an hour - three hours seems entirely reasonable to me.

Sam

In which case try justifying it in court. Bearing in mind that the OP claims this is the third time he has had to contact them - would you be keen to suggest in court that it took 3 x 3 = 9 hours to send three fairly identical replies? If you disagree with my opinion that is fine, but I really don`t fancy your chances.

Banks regularly send out letters that they don't even mean to send out, these days. I regularly get one regarding the details of my mortgage that are no longer even vaguely relevant, but when I phone up to query it, I'm told `oh, just ignore it, the computer sends out one of those automatically, it wasn't meant for you'.

But, as Mr Wilson says, it you're writing about anything non-trivial to a bank, you're spending quite some time on it or getting something wrong. Whether or not the bank subsequently takes any notice of it is another matter. The time I spent most of a day writing a complicated letter to RBS, receiving an answer that said `yes, that's OK' and subsequently having someone ignore that answer, do the opposite thing, and deny that the person who wrote that reply had the authority to do so. So I left.

If I were writing three identically worded letters then the second and third would take less time. Collecting information, sifting it to decide which was relevant to include, getting the wording right, suppressing the desire to write what I really thought, checking the information again - all that takes time and if it came to it I'd be happy[1] to justify that in court or anywhere else.

Sam

To be more precise, phone bank to try to clear things up. Wait on hold while bank collects money via the 845 or 870 number. Get told to write. Hunt for year-old correspondence. Copy same. Boot computer, start to write letter. Take letter to post office for recorded delivery - 80 mins. (walk to bus stop : 5 minutes Wait for bus : 10 mins on average Travel to main post office : 15 mins (all the small ones seem to be closed) Walk from bus stop to PO : 5 mins. Wait in long queue : 10 mins (most small POs are now closed) Reverse these steps.)

Easily 3 hours for a private individual.

You can knock most of that time off for the vast majority of people in the UK, who have cars and would be expected to use them to visit a post office.

I don't see why you should be compensated for the inconvenience it would cause someone else, rather than for the inconvenience it caused you.

If the bank only wants to pay the amount of compensation appropriate to people with cars, then it should only send false arrears claims to people with cars.

-- Richard

and in any case - getting to the post office by car involves time and frequently car parking fees.

So why should I be compensated for the fact that it takes you 80 minutes to get to a post fofice, rather than the 10 minute round trip, including being served, it takes me?

Obviously that depends where you live. Out of the 5 nearest post office I can think of, none of them are more than a 10 minute drive away, and all of them have plenty of free parking within a couple of minutes walk.