That seems overkill. There is no mention of this requirement on their website either. While they have to take reasonable precautions to ensure the person requesting the file is entitled to it, the demand to see your passport or birth certificate AND 2 other forms of ID is absurd. If you are on the electoral roll they should be able to verify you from that.

Where do they get the idea from that the Data Protection Act doesn't apply to manually held data? The DPA 1998 extended the original 1984 act to cover manually held data, so they should be able to provide the information they hold on you.

Has anyone ever challenged the fees the banks charge for discharging a mortgage? I ask as I recently sold a property and paid off the mortgage. Northern Rock charged me £250 for handling the discharge, a fee I consider to be excessive. I have written to them and asked them if they will reduce this, but all I got was a standard letter stating "its in the T's and C's". If anyone has challenged the fee and got a result it would be helpful to hear from you.

Marie, Was your phone damaged in this incident?

Did you get an itemised list of all your calls in the £550 bill? If you did have you studied it to see if the calls are genuine? If you made the calls and ran up that bill then you have no choice but to pay it. If you didn't make the calls and they have been credited to your account and you are disputing it, that would seem to be the only basis in which you can challenge the bill. O2 have no obligation to inform you the bill is reaching those proportions under normal usage. You are an adult and it is your responsibility to monitor your phone usage. It may be possible to arrange with them to limit your usage down to a certain level each month to avoid big bills.

With the insurers, there is an Ombudsman that deals specifically with issues relating to the insurance companies. I think you have to go through the companies complaints procedure first of all before you can refer it to the Ombudsman. But I agree with the suggestion to fight this matter. Especially given the legal implications for you with regards to technically not being insured at the time of the accident.

Perhaps you could ask them to give you a full breakdown of their admin charges, how they arrived at them, what work was done to justify such a charge?

I think OFWAT have ordered Thames Water to spend £150 million of their profits in fixing leaks.

The only problem with only going after the excess is that if you had any no claims bonus on the home insurance, it will be reduced because you made a claim. If the damage caused was the fault of the car driver, then your insurance company should be able to claim the full amount back including your excess.

I was in a similar situation recently. A direct debit was paid out, putting me £26 over my OD limit. They hit me with a £25 charge for this and then followed that up with a further charge of £25 on day 2, and another £25 on day 5 for the unauthroised overdraft. I phoned them up about the first charge and they agreed to refund it. I took steps to transfer funds into the account, but it was done electronically and took 4 days. Phoned them about the other £50 of charges and they refused to refund them. So I wrote to them and explained my circumstances (£500 vets bill when one of my cats was taken ill and eventually diagnosed with kidney failure. had to have her put down:( ). They then wrote to me and asked me to contact them by phone. On doing this, I was told they were refunding the charges. Always worth a shot with a well written letter first of all.

Looking at the Black Horse website, they only list 2 specific products which they offer when buying a car through them. Either HP or a personal contract purchase plan. Hire purchase is available on cars up to 10 years old, the PCP is only available on new and used cars up to 3 years old. They will offer payment terms on HP from 1 to 5 years. But it does seem odd that they have inserted such a clause within a personal loan which effectively makes it a HP agreement.

PJ, Thanks for that, it worked on my T630 and I now have push texts disabled.

That doesn't sound right at all. If its a personal loan then as long as you make the payments on it then you can sell the car if you want. What they are effectively telling you is that you have a HP agreement, not a personal loan. It might be worth asking to speak to someone who has a supervisory capacity within Black Horse

It shouldn't be showing on the HPI register as outstanding finance in that case. Have you considered contacting them to enquire as to why they have it listed as such?

Dave, Can you tell me how to access this menu on the Sony phones please?

Council tax is based on 2 adults living in a property. If there are more than 2 adults living there then the council tax does not increase, unlike the old poll tax which required payment for every adult that lived in a household. My partner and I are jointly named on our council tax bill and I would imagine that should we default they could come after us both, so it seems strange that as you are jointly named on the bill with your partner that they are only going after her. Is your stepson named on the council tax bill at all?

In respect of the loan, Black Horse should be able to provide you with a copy of the agreement that you signed which should detail if its a personal loan or HP. If its the former then you can sell the car and still carry on paying the loan off.

I'm surprised that your insurance company have not made a claim from the drivers insurance for their losses.

NTL! What a bunch of idiots. I had an internet account with them from October 2000 to February 2004. All was well until October 2003 when they "enhanced" the service. It was total pants so the following February I took my custom elsewhere. I phoned up to cancel the account and I was told that I had to give 30 days notice. Fair enough I thought, but on getting home I discovered they had disabled the account that same day! So I didn't pay for the final months service ( fair enough I thought as I couldn't access the service). A few months later I got a letter from a DCA asking for payment of £15. I had heard nothing from NTL in that period of time. I hadn't moved and my phone number had remained the same, but instead of contacting me, they passed it on to a DCA! I wrote to the DCA and explained the position, informing them of what had happened and the DCA replied and stated they were passing the matter back to NTL. I have heard nothing more since. NTL really are a waste of space.

It will also depend on what the service schedule is for that particular model. Do you have the owners handbook for the car? It should be listed there. Failing that, you could contact a local Toyota dealer and see if they will let you have a copy of the schedule. You could also ask them what the service would cost through them to give you a baseline.

It might be worth contacting the local Trading Standards office to see if they can help. They may well have received complaints in the past about this particular garage.

Seems like MBNA are taking it to the extreme with regards to the DPA request. They need to be able to satisfy themselves that the person making the request is entitled to the information, but to ask for documents such as a passport is taking it to the extreme. It should be sufficient for them to have the relevent account details and perhaps a copy of a utility bill. It might be worth ringing the Information Commissioners office for advice if they insist on seeing identity documents.

I did get a refund of a late payment charge and interest from Nationwide over my credit card payment arriving a day late, as a result of me phoning them. But it took a letter to Alliance & Leicester to achieve the same result. I think a lot of it depends on your initial demeanour on the phone and also who you speak to on the day.

£500 to change a mortgage from repayment to interest only seems excessive. I was charged £50 in 1993 to change from interest only to repayment, which I considered a reasonable enough charge.

Looking through some of the case histories here, it would be difficult to forget the real problem with the banks and building socities. I've been fortunate in the last 10-15 years and haven't had to deal with crap from them like some have, but I had the same issues with Nat West in the late 80's, whacking on outrageous charges for silly little things. Its a shame that a forum like this one wasn't around back then, but at least I learnt from the experience.