Sorry, but I smell BS here. No phonecalls from any line in this country cost £2/second. 01234 is a geographical code, and you will be charged a geographical rate depending on where you call from.

(oversimplification) intention, offer, acceptance, consideration. I'll come back to this. But first: The words THIS IS A CREDIT AGREEMENT REGULATED BY THE CONSUMER CREDIT ACT 1974 (or similar) are generally the dead giveaway. The facility of credit is ther consideration. Your promise to meet the bill is yours. Maybe, but not a requirement for a contract. Fraudulent terms does not mean a contract is invalid, just that you can treat the contract either with different terms ("interpretation most favourable") or as if those terms did not exist ("not binding upon the consumer"). Of course, if there's nothing left of the contract after you've done that, that's another story. Legally, a company is a person. Any part of the law which applies to people will refer to a "natural person", whereas anything relating to both people and companies will refer to a "legal person". A representative of the company may sign on the company's behalf. What is required (in simple terms - it's rather more complex than this) is: * Intent: By advertising, the bank has made it known it intends to form a legal relation. By responding, you have signalled your intent to form a legal relation. * Offer: The bank will offer you terms, and you offer the bank your status. * Acceptance: If both sides find the other to be acceptable, they sign on the dotted line (or by the red X as it seems to be these days). * Consideration: The bank pays for things on your behalf, you pay the bank in interest. Names are case-insensitive. It is only by tradition and by custom that folk like tony blair and gordon brown usually have their initials capitalised. Namely your bank statement ... That'll be the "Statement of Truth" section on the claim form, then. SS77-79 Consumer Credit Act, though in fairness the banks seem to have difficulty in fulfilling such requests properly. ... other than that which arises from the money of theirs you have spent. Such a thing does not exist. Contracts are mutual agreements between two parties, founded on good faith (hence the "no penalties" thing). Anything which is extremely one-sided is by definition not a contract. Actually, that's more to do with the duty of the Government to protect children, (arising from UNCRC), as well as the whole "act now, clean up later" thing, where things like mental illness are a barrier to the parent doing anything about it. I might like to see a copy. I've been dying for a good laugh lately.

7-day LBA for £30 billion to the OFT for negligence. Roughly £4bn for each year it has had the ability to retaliate against the use and enforcement of unfair terms in consumer contracts. I dare you.

Indeed - if you end up simply going down the court order route (again, find that guidance note to save yourself £120 in fees), make sure you include all the paperwork you have sent, and the details of the data controller from the Data Protection Register - in one case (RBS, I think), the judge was so appalled by a delay they stated that had they known the name of the registered controller they would have made an order for their imprisonment.

Have you actually contacted the ICO, or are you making that judgment based on what others have said here? If that fails, put a formal complaint to the ICO, and look at obtaining a court order for compliance (the Office has some guidance somewhere which advises that this can be dealt with as a £30 case, as opposed to a full-rate £150 non-cash claim - find this first, and send a printed copy in with your claim), which you should be able to obtain in short order.

Maybe. ISTR at least one other person here doing something similar (along the lines of "if you charge me, I will invoice you for the charge and my costs"), not sure how they got on. I'll bet they do, but you're not a judge. No court in the land will award a lay person £100 per day in costs for small claims. Fact is, you would then have to prove that loss to the court. It's not enough to say "I get paid £12/hour, and have to take 4 hours off to do this". If someone has breached a contract with you, you can't bill them at your usual service rate. To get beyond the £9.25, you have to prove that you actually lost money - as in it was a statistical certainty that you would have been paid but were not. That's excessive again. Out of all of that time, you can only pass on the half-hour for drafting the letter (you've hit that spot-on, though - generally accepted billing practice is half an hour for a letter). The idea is that once you have done the research once, you do not need to do it again. Billing for further time for things such as "walking to the PO" is taking the mickey, though. On the other hand, if you serve the letters by recorded or special delivery, again that is a cost to you that you would not otherwise have incurred, which you could reasonably pass on (but if you ask someone to pay you £5 for SD, make sure you actually do use SD).

£50 per half day = 4 hours @ £12.50. Or to be really picky, 3h42m @ £13.51.

You and the rest of the world ;-)

You would not have needed to do the work if it were not for the "something they have done", hence it is a cost, not a service. Saying you will charge someone for costs you have incurred is a contractual penalty, which is not allowed. You can only pass on a reasonable value of the cost itself.

Because that is a service they are performing at your request, and (hopefully) to your benefit.

The scary part is that, besides the £50 per half-day, that seems reasonable. Even the method of execution is probably sound - after all, if the banks can say that you gave consent by your actions, then turnabout is fair play. At the £50 per half-day, it will be seen as excessive, since administrative labour is counted in units of quarter- or half-hours (not days), and the court will only award £9.25/hour anyway. £5 per half-hour you might get away with, but at £50 per half-day it's almost certainly a penalty, equally unenforceable as those the banks impose. Good thinking, though

A default is a form of enforcement action.

No, I'm going to tell you that Windows is not the best operating system out there (I'm probably making a big jump in assuming you know what an "operating system" is, and the difference between the OS and userspace programs). This statement is flawed, in that is has absolutely FA to do with the concept of anti-competitive practices on the part of Microsoft or (as was originally raised) eBay.

Not entirely related to banking: IIRC, if you are a business processing information about your customers and suppliers purely for keeping records of your dealings, notification with the ICO is not necessary (they refer to this purpose as "accounts and records"). Where in the Act is this stated? I've glanced through the "exemptions" sections and Schedule 7 (though not particularly rigorously), searched through the text of the Act, to no avail.

I think you have fundamentally misunderstood everything I have said, so I will repeat it ad nauseam until you get it There is absolutely no way you can logically make the connection "the bank wants confidentiality" to "they know their charges are unlawful". Would you suggest that any company that concludes any agreement for "an undisclosed sum" is acting unlawfully? There are far too many reasons why anyone might want confidentaility. For each and every one of the following, taken individually, you can make the connection, as they are pretty unambiguous: I've taken out #7, since expensive lawyers is again SOP for big companies (this is self-fulfilling - large companies want reputable firms, and will pay big money for it, so such legal firms can charge as much as they like).

Are you having difficulty reading this thread? Virgin Media don't chase late payers in any way whatsoever and therefore do not incur any costs in doing so. Translation: "Crap, I haven't got anything to back up my point, I'll just pretend I do and insult everyone else instead."

Complete and utter poppycock. It certainly doesn't require integration to the degree that your Web browser doubles up as your shell application. I'm having difficulty in parsing this sentence due to it making absolutely no sense whatsoever. Can you elaborate?

See "MCS", read "HSBC".

Anyone else thinking that 14 unsatisfied CCJs should raise flags in the whole "fitness to hold a credit licence" department?

It may have something to do with the fact that the nomorepaypal.com domain expired early in March, though the owner of the domain may redeem it for a hefty amount of money.

I hold no envy of anyone who has had to pick through all 1300 sections (plus appendices) of the Companies Act to establish that. :o

Your new card provider has a duty to make good with the old provider. If they have credited your old card twice and added the balance to your new card only once, then they owe your old provider the sum of the balance. You would owe them nothing unless your old provider has actually sent you money in lieu of the credit balance. You would, however, owe them any money you have actually spent (though you should be able to settle the purchases in the usual way). This is my reading of it, and could be horrendously wrong. More detail is needed methinks.

As far as I am aware, the whole "x% of balance or £5" requires that there is a balance outstanding. They can't demand a payment against an account where none is due.

Wrong. Plenty beats Windows and Office. The anti-trust issue is more to do with Microsoft selling Windows to manufacturers for peanuts on the condition that their machines ship with Windows and nothing else (potentially crossing the line from hard bargaining to economic duress), and the bundled Web browser giving them an unfair market advantage gleaned entirely from inertia. Microsoft's product line is mixed at best - Visual Studio and the C# programming language are pretty good, IIS and Exchange are not brilliant, SourceSafe is so horrendous MS has practically disowned it, and Windows Vista has simultaneously missed the boat (with its scheduled release in 2003 originally put back to 2005) and arrived too soon (the high-spec hardware required to run it well isn't widely available). Courts in the US and EU have decided that their bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows is unfair, yet the integration is so tight that Microsoft actually finds it cheaper to simply pay what is equivalent to a million dollars in fines every day than to re-engineer IE or the Windows shell to unpick the two.

As far as I am aware, it is a legal requirement that information on individual financial transactions is retained for a minimum of 6 years. If the information has been destroyed as a matter of course, there is no concealment. There is no real reason for them to retain the information beyond the 6 years required by law. Concealment of evidence only really comes into play if they have not destroyed the data, yet refuse to provide it on request.