BTW, if anyone has been unlucky enough to fall foul of these people, demand your money back. And if they cold called you, report them to the OFT. I literally have a load of clients who went with them and entrusted often vastt sums of money to them, only to discover much later that they haven't paid a bean. Quite a few people I've helped with this end up finding out that the county court judgements have been racking up without their knowledge because First Steps sit on all correspondnce and pretend everything is in dispute.

Prima, coud you tell us what this company is doing on the Ministry Of Justice "Minded to Revoke List" if, as you say "they can deliver". They deliver heartache and not an awful lot else. They're about to have their license yanked as a result. Check this folks, if you like. It is FACT. It is a disgrace that you have posted this. Oh and BTW, I am a debt adviser in the NFP sector and I get more debts written off in a week than this company gets in ten years. We don't charge for this. Please ignore Prima's post

I agree. Your best bet is to switch bank accounts. Pay day loan companies are not to be trusted.

They are entitled to be shown proof that your income is not sufficient to keep to the terms of the agreement. Were they to seek legal enforcement.,the court would expect to see a completed means enquiry from you to establish that you genuinely can't afford to keep to the arrangement. Then again, you could just ignore them. They often give up and go away intermittently without really doing anything further to enforce the debt. Then again, they often come back and pass the debt on to some other DCA and the whole cycle starts over again. You have very little to fear because DCA's are largely very stupid and not as difficult to ignore as people think. Tell them you ware not willfully avoiding payment and you intend to cooperate but you will not discuss the matter via a home visit and should a debt collector come to the door, you will be reporting the matter to Consumer Direct, the FSO and every other bugger you can think of.

**** off dca's.

I have a client who is in his mid forties. He is a father of seven year old twins. Three years ago he was diagnosed with cancer of the small bowel and he has been unable to work since then. Up until that point, he had been the family's only bread winner. His wife does not work and since the onset of my client's illness, he has been unable to work and the family's entire income ever since. f Last month I got a message from my client's Macmillan based welfare rights adviser to say that his condition had deteriorated and significantly and he had moved into the final stages of the illness. I wrote to Lloyds on his behalf to advise them of this fact and to confirm and he was spending some of his time in a respite hospice. I asked for the overdraft to be written off on the grounds of hardship and serious family illness. By the end of last week, I had received no reply. I then received a further message from the Macmillan worker to say that he had again been admitted to the hospice, was now too poorly to return home and was not expected to survive for more than a few weeks. I have written to two non priority creditors to request that they write off the debts in question on hardship and serious illness grounds. The balances outstanding are not much more than £1,000 each and I am intending to press them for a decision on this next week. The real problem, though, has been caused by the utter callousness and incompetence of his current account provider, Lloyds TSB. They have been levying charges intermittently for an unauthorised overdraft over a period of time, now, and last week, I was informed that a letter had been sent to the family home by Lloyds to advise that fees were being charged at £15 per day. For reasons already described, this was the source of significant distress for the family and it was important that the bank be informed of the current situation so that they would not continue to levy charges. Last Friday, I telephoned our client's local branch of Lloyds on the family's behalf. I described the circumstances and explained that my client was desperately worried about his family's financial position and the fact that he will not be around to provide for his children. From all accounts, he has been thinking of little else. I explained to the local branch that quite apart from the awfulness of the situation, these financial difficulties are a source of conflict between our client and his wife because she cannot focus on anything other than the fact that she is losing her husband and the father of her children and understandably has not felt able to engage in the debt advice process. Our client's perspective, on the other hand, is concentrated entirely on doing as much as he can to stabilise family's financial position. in the limited time he has left. I am told by the family's Macmillan based welfare rights adviser that their different approaches and mind sets have been a source of conflict because my client is to poorly to Indeed, it would be inappropriate to expect her to do so, given the circumstances. Meanwhile, my client is become frustrated that more is not being done to address some specific problems with the family finances. It is an extremely distressing situation for all and it is being compounded significantly by the breathtakingly callous behaviour of his current account provider, Lloyds TSB. I have written to two of my client's creditors to request they consider writing off existing debts of about £1,000 each.

I have a client who is in his mid forties. He is a father of seven year old twins. Three years ago he was diagnosed with cancer of the small bowel and he has been unable to work since then. Up until that point, he had been the family's only bread winner. His wife does not work and since the onset of my client's illness, the family's entire income has been exclusively made up of benefits. Inevitably, this has meant that the family have experienced long standing financial problems and there has been a degree of hardship througout the duration of his illness. Nonetheless, he and his wife have been incredibly vigilent with respect to their finances and have been making sacrifices over a long period in an effort to make payments to even the most non priority of non priority creditors. For reasons that will be made clear, this approach is no longer sustainable. Other than the two debts referred to above, our client and his wife have an overdraft on their jount current account with Lloyds TSB. This overdraft was partially generated by bank charges for unauthorised overdraft fees. On 4th November, we received a further message from the family's Macmillan adviser to say that our client was now too poorly to be cared for at home and had been admitted to a hospice. He was not expected to survive for much longer and would be leaving behind seven year old twins. By all accounts, he is tormented by the idea that he will not be able to provide for his young children as they grow up and has become increasingly preoccupied with their future financial welfare to the exclusion of almost everything else. Unfortunately, in the midst of all this, Lloyds TSB wrote to the family home to say that bank charges for an unplanned overdraft was currently being levied on the rent account at a rate of £15 per day as a result. Needless to say, the letter from Lloyds with respect to fees has been the source of a great deal of distress and it was important to address the issue immediately to prevent further emotional damage to our client and his family. On speaking further with the Macmillan adviser over the telephone, I was advised that the issue of family finances had become a source of friction between our client and his wife because she is emotionally overwhelmed by the fact that she is losing her husband and the father of her children and is unable to focus on anything else. Their priorities as to this are very much at odds and our client is finding it difficult to understand why his wife is not spending more time dealing with some of the family's more immediate and pressing finanical problems now that he is too ill to deal with these things himself. On November 5th, I telephoned our client's local branch of Lloyds about these developments I described the circumstances and explained that my client was desperately worried about his family's financial position and is tormented by the idea that he will not be around to provide for his family in the years to come. In the time still left he is becoming extremely anxious to see that his family's financial position is at least stabilised and the bank's letter about £15 per day overdraft fees was making his state of mind worse still. The branch initially refused to respond to what was being told to them and said they were not prepared to entertain cessation of charges unless the account holders made an appointment to attend an interview at their local branch. I told them that this was not acceptable and I would be making contact with the relevant regulatory bodies if this decision was allowed to stand. Eventually they gave me the phone number of their customer relations department. They said that at branch level they had no authority to amend the records of their customer's account records and so could not nake a note of any new developments, how ever important. They offered absolutely no assistance whatsoever beyond this point. I rang their Customer Relations Team and spoke to a man who came across at utterly indifferent to the problem. After he repeatedly refused to discuss the matter, he eventually checked the records and said that no bank charges were being applied, albeit fees had been levied on the account in the past. Initially he refused to take any steps to make sure that fees would not resume and said that whilst no fees were being applied, he could not commit to saying more fees will not be levied at a later date. I advised that I would be speaking to the Office of Fair Trading and the Financial Services Ombudsman to request their intervention, should he not give guarantees that he would see to it that the bank treat this matter with the utmost respect and sensitivity and reluctant though he might to lift a finger to help, it was in the interests of his employer that he take our discussion seriously and act accordingly. He eventually agreed agreed to make a note on the system and then promptly didn't. . One week on and a further letter has been sent out to the family home confirming the resumptions of fees at a rate of £15 per day. To cut a long story short, I had telephone conversations today with no less than eight employees of that ****** of a bank before I could get any action on this matter whatsoever and it was 4.30pm on a Friday before there was a breakthrough of sorts. I got a name and a fax number for someone within that organisation who would agree to discuss the matter sensibly but by this time, it was 4.30pm on a Friday and they had all gone home. There is even more to it than that but I'm too tired to relate it. If anyone has any ideas about any legal way to get these bastards for their callous indifference, it would be much appreciated.

I've just spent two months trying to negotiate with Monument on behalf of a client. It started off as a bog standard request to revise repayment terms falling a reduction in household income but it turned into something much worse. The creditor was ringing my client (a pensioner) five and six times a day in spite of the fact that they knew about the change in circumstances (and we can prove that they knew) and they knew the calls were causing distress. Even after our client registered a complaint with the (utterly useless) OFT and quoted a complaint reference number to Monument to prove it, the morons in the Collections Department variously denied and then admitted receipt of correspondence from ourselves and from our client; denied and then admitted receipt of various letters of complaint, which they characterised as offers of payment and not letters of complaint and capped it all off earlier this week by openly refusing to stop ringing our client to pursue collection on the debt multiple times a day. Today, I finally got their Customer Relations Dept to delete our client's phone numbers from their records an and they d all but conceded that they would be open to the idea of compensating the client for the distress they had caused, the lies they had told, and the deranged way they had ignored all previous complaints. They admitted to receipt of our last complaint and told us to send any further correspondence to their "Harassment Department". Doesn't this beg a rather obvious question? Why would they have a something called a "Harassment Department" unless they were engaged in endemic and deliberate harassment? Anyone else come across anything like this? Because it is insane.

The idiot banks are not obliged to refund benefit monies already taken and I wouldn't bother trying to convince them that they need to refund on the basis of what social security legislation has to say on the matter. The statute is too vague and too easy for them to dodge. The only strategy that seems to work if you're trying to get a refund for your client of previously appropriated funds is to make the argument that by taking these monies, they had committed a breach of their Banking Code regulations to treat financial hardship cases in a sympathetic and reasonable manner and taking a big chunk of their subsistence monies is not the most convincing way to demonstrate compliance. I've had three successes using this argument. One client got a £475 refund and all charges withdrawn. one got £40 and the account was set to zero balance. The FSO wrote to all the high street credit peddlars back in November telling them that the regulator was getting swamped with complaints about this and needed the banks to cool it on the appropriation issue. I stick a copy of that letter in with my own and it seems to work.

You need to send them a letter of first appropriation. There's a template somewhere on this site.

Thanks. They want locking up.

I'm on their case, also. Just got a warrant suspended for a client today. Appallingly dealt with by these corporate psychopaths. Quite determined they were, to throw a family out on the street even after a nailed on remedy had been guaranteed to them by the Prevention of Repossession Scheme. They turned down £1,000 from the borrower and £3,000 from the Scheme. Five minutes later, the hearing was over, the warrant was suspended on terms of instalment plus £50 and no lump sum offer whatsoever. it's going to take eight years before the idiots see their arrears money and my client is about to make a claim for a substantial refund from them. Dicks. .

Interesting. They have been fined over a million for behaviour dating back to 2008 and earned some sort of a discount so they didn't have to pay the full amount. And lo and behold, I represented a client at court today who has been treated so shabbily by Kensington that it is perhaps the worst example of immoral, shark like behaviour in a lender that I have ever seen. And I've been doing consumer and housing law for twenty years. My client offered them a lump sum off the arrears and then instalment plus £50 and the lump sum was pretty much cast iron and proven, since the money was coming from the council via the Repossession Prevention Scheme and they had spent a week confirming this to Kensington. Still refused. Had to do an N244 on Friday and attend a hearing earlier today with the bailiffs scheduled to carry out the evition tomorrow. They refused client's last offer two minutes before the hearing. We got the thing suspended anyway though, without having to offer a lump sum of any description and the court has given our client eight years to settle the arrears. Kensington are evil and sociopathiic and it's a damn good job they're also stupid. Utter, utter ****. The FSA will be hearing of this ... AGAIN.