This topic was closed on 03/07/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

This topic was closed on 03/07/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

This topic was closed on 03/07/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

This topic was closed on 03/06/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

This topic was closed on 03/06/19. If you have a problem which is similar to the issues raised in this topic, then please start a new thread and you will get help and support there. If you would like to post up some information which is relevant to this particular topic then please flag the issue up to the site team and the thread will be reopened. - Consumer Action Group

Ooohhhh... Is it more or less wrong than letting them go to a Housing Association for less than 10,000 each? This is what Crawley is trying to do. I can see why: they can offload their obligations and improve their cashflow problems but I've seen it in other areas: tenants' rights are eroded and rents shoot up. I actually wrote an article published in the local paper last year, suggesting that if they do go ahead with these sales, they should be obliged to offer the same homes to qualifying tenants for, say, 30 thousand. That way, they still dump their responsibilities but get a lot more for it, and even someone on minimum legal wages could afford to buy their house. The rent on my council flat started going up at an alarming rate every year after a HA bought it. When I did a mutual exchange, the HA put the rent for my old flat up again by around 15%, even though it was already about 20% higher than for three-bed houses in the same street, and the other party - the other exchanger moving into it - lost her right to buy. Councils cannot afford and/or manage to maintain the homes they provide to a decent standard. If I want to buy my house as things stand, it will cost around 150K. That money would enable the council to build 2, or possibly 3 new, lower maintenance houses. Remember that they can purchase land, and build, at prices far, far lower than you or I can. How is that wrong?

Wow, thanks all! Bankoff, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about a Power of Attorney as something distinct from an Enduring Power of Attorney; that's what I was asking you about: the POA that is necessary if there is no EPA in place. I can find lots of info on the procedures for an EPA but precious little about a POA. Good to know that the fees have come down.

All this was around two years ago now but I'm wondering about the position. I decided to go for Tiscali broadband and duly signed up online. In due course, I received the package containing external modem, etc. However, half the components listed were missing, making it impossible to install. I phoned Tiscali but was met with a system of options: Are you a new broadband customer? yes Have you installed everything as instructed? No In that case, phone us again when you have.. Trying again: ... Have you installed everything as instructed? I tried 'yes' this time. Please hold.... (annoying muzak)... We're sorry but there's no one available to take your call. Try again later Turning to online options, I found a list of email addresses that were each for a specific sort of problem, none of which was "missing bits". I just chose the top one on the list and got a curt reply saying "Not our department, not interested. Phone customer services." One option back then in the phone menu was Accounts. I tried this as I was systematically trying every option by then. It led to a recording stating that they now had a dedicated phone number just for accounts queries, so I phoned that one. I finally go to speak to someone! He said he was horrified to hear of my problems (the best way to respond to complaints, I've been taught) and offered the following solution: he said he had put a note on my account to the effect that no money may be extracted from my bank account until I had actually connected to the service at least once. Fairly satisfied with this, I continued to try phoning for a week or so and eventually gave up on Tiscali altogether. Some months later, I was horrified to notice that they had taken out of my account not only a hefty set-up fee, but monthly charges for 4 months as well - I was also ashamed that I had paid so little attention to my bank statements. I was able to stop all further payments and this initiated a stern series of letters from Tiscali threatening to cut off my service. One final letter said, more or less, "obviously you don't want our service so this is the parting of the ways. Bye." The (amateur) advice I had then was to keep quiet because I had signed up for a minimum of one year. If I made a fuss asking for money back, Tiscali might be within their rights to insist I pay for the whole year. I wrote it off as a bad loss but... does anyone know if I might have had a case against them?

It is a free car park and the notices state that it is for the use of patrons only. It is surrounded on three sides by various leisure facilities: a health club, a bar, a bowling centre and arcade, a 25 screen cinema, Italian restaurant, Maccy D's, Pizza Hut, TGI Friday and Brannigan's (club). By 'patrons' we all presume that they mean anyone patronising any of those establishments is free to park there while doing so. It is roughly a quarter of a mile from the main shopping area of Crawley, and so was getting used by a few citizens as free parking for the purposes of going shopping. My point about unwary cinema-goers is that they have been clamped for staying too long after their film finished and/or for losing their validating film ticket. But this is vague as it has not happened to me. There are no signs setting out the terms at either of the entrances to this massive car parking area.

Bankfodder, I already have links to free EPA forms - enduring power of attorney, through the guardianship.gov site. I had been trying to get my mum to move into sheltered accommodation nearer me for past year. She was not interested and when, a few months ago, she started having periods of delusion and confusion, I started looking into the EPA route, fearing that her mental state might worsen. She was also getting more frail and careless - not noticing that the house was filling with gas when a burner on the hob went out, for instance, and eating food way past its sell-by date. A consultant psychiatrist friend (friend of my mum's, more than me) assured me that this could not be Alzheimer's disease, by the way, as you just do not get to the final stages (paranoid delusions and hallucinations) without going through increasing forgetfullness, etc. My mother was still lucid enough to, for example, arrange and pay for a taxi to take her to a friend's house in another town, be ready at the agreed time, give the driver the correct address, etc. She was still capable of withdrawing the right amount of cash each week to pay the milkman and the gardener, and go food shopping. However, I presumed (wrongly, I now realise) that it was too late to get her to sign an EPA, even if she would agree, because she was already no longer of sound mind. Note to anyone for future cases: The Mental Health Act states that all adults are capable of making decisions about their lives, even when mentally handicapped or suffering dementia, unless expressly diagnosed as unfit to do so. So, even though my mother was seeing hordes of visitors being led through her bedroom at night by tour guides who then took them through a hole in the wall to visit the Roman ruins just discovered under her house, and pixies dancing along the sofa while I was sitting there talking to her, - even though she was complaining about my boyfriend wandering around her house naked - she could still have been considered to be of sufficiently sound mind. In fact, the consultant at the hospital now says I still shouldn't rule it out. However: an EPA needs to be registered with the Court of Protection at such time as the attorney (me) has reasonable evidence that the donor (Mum) is no longer able to manage her affairs. If an EPA is signed by the donor and then registered immediately, isn't that a bit suspicious? I mean, if she's no longer able to manage her affairs, then she was also not qualified to sign the EPA. She can't really hold a pen at the moment, either. I suppose it's still worth trying. About cost: websites tell me that it costs around £500 to register an EPA, plus around £300 for something else (I forget at this moment what), plus another couple of hundred a year after that. This is usually paid out of the donor's estate. Everywhere I look, it says that having to get a POA (when no EPA is in place) is much more expensive. Bankoff, you say that it costs around £250 to register a POA. I have had no luck finding out about the procedures for this, could you enlighten me with a link or two, or where to find leaflets?

There is indeed no right or wrong time to have a baby - I know whereof I speak! But what has happened to our society? How would you have survived if you had not been allowed to just keep borrowing? Is it the crazy house prices? And are they fuelled by pop stars and fat cats all wanting to live in London and hence affecting the rest of the market? House prices are kept too high by everyone just agreeing to them and taking on more debt than they can realistically afford. Dutch friends who have moved to England agree that the attitude to money here is vastly different: I don't mean to be judgemental but it seems the norm to live beyond one's means here. In the supermarkets, there are only one or two aisles of fresh meat and poultry - the rest is all prepared and processed stuff. Two whole aisles of just crisps! And then the disposable products: wipes to take off your make-up, wipes to clean the toilet seat and kitchen surfaces, disposable duster 'systems' and disposable floor cloths - even disposable toilet brushes, for Pete's sake! If we're all struggling to get by then why oh why is anyone BUYING this stuff? Quite apart from the environmental burden, it's costing us a fortune. Well, not me because I don't buy any of them. I think the banks throwing credit at everyone aggravates this problem. Back in Amsterdam, when I left a job for one paying 30% more, I almost immediately went house hunting. I bought a flat and decided on a 15 year mortgage to keep my interest costs low: my friends said I was crazy to take on such a large monthly obligation (nearly half my salary) and in the end they were right: my job disappeared two years later after a takeover closed my office down. I was unemployed (more or less, a chapter of improbable accidents) for over a year after that and had to sell up. With a more normal mortgage, I would have been able to ride it out. I read somewhere (someone might put the details straight here) that the percentage of all money earned in the UK has doubled in the past two decades for the top 2%. I.e., the fat cats took around 6% of everything 20 years ago and now they get 13%. This means that everyone else suffers. Case in point: 20 - 25 years ago, I remember noticing (when I visited London) that a good typist could earn around £9 an hour as a temp. These days, as an eloquent, well-educated, highly intelligent, widely experienced and extremely fast audio/copy typist, I am hard pushed to get 8! And that's WHEN I can actually get any temp work. In real terms, that's a fraction of what they used to pay and you'd have to pay more than that for a cleaner or a gardener. I have discussed this with agencies, arguing that the 7.50 I was getting offered was more appropriate for an average school leaver with a few GCSEs and a couple of years' office experience, and was told that no, that would be 6.50!! If you look on the 'net for jobs as a credit controller, phoning people like us to harrass them about their debts, the rate is.... 6.50 an hour! So don't expect any sense out of them. My current partner (of two years) is very cautious with money and we have worked out that we simply cannot afford to buy my little 2 bed council house while my income is uncertain.

I was wrong; it was three weeks ago, not two. I lose track, partly because I became ill around a week later myself, with something akin to 'flu. It was a shock, as a stroke always is I suppose. In this case, I became alarmed that my mum wasn't answering the phone. As I live nearly an hour's drive away, I phoned 999 before jumping in the car myself. When I got there, they had broken in and found her on the floor. We estimate that she must have been there two days and one night. She arrived at hospital with a temperature of just 32 (severe hypothermia) and serious dehydration. Being over 80, she wasn't expected to survive. One of the questions I was asked was: does she own her own home? Strange, now I think about it. These events are partly what led to my finding this site as I have been trying to prevent excessive overdue fees mounting up on her accounts. My mother is now still in the acute stroke assessment ward. The consultant in charge will not be drawn on the prognosis except to say that she may well be able to go home with an extensive care package but it's too early to tell. Her going home does not seem a truly viable option to me, nor to friends who visit and happen to be doctors themselves. After three weeks, she has reached a mental level where she does not appear to recognise anyone. She thinks various nurses are me. She thinks all sorts of people are regularly visiting her. She doesn't seem to know she's in hospital but accepts the help of the nurses. She hallucinates most of the time. She has lost a large portion of her vocabulary. She has daily physiotherapy but is bedridden, and it still takes two nurses just to help her sit up enough to eat. They have indeed said that rehabilitation, after finishing her current assessment phase, will take up to 7 weeks. But with such severe cognitive impairment, a patient can't benefit much from rehabilitation because she can't remember what they are teaching her. If the NHS do pick up the whole bill for her nursing/care home, they would take over her pension and leave a little pocket money for her. This means there would be no money to pay utility bills or maintainance on her house so it will have to be sold in any event. Does anyone know how to start the ball rolling for getting power of attorney? Any way of limiting solicitors' and courts' fees? There is no EPA in place and I've heard that this makes the whole thing very expensive. Any advice gratefully received.

I'm starting this thread though my original comment was elsewhere. I mentioned that my mother had a severe stroke two weeks ago and was coming up for assessment very soon at the hospital where she currently is. BANKOFF WROTE: QUOTE: From my own experience, it may take some time for them to rehabilitate your mother, so you don't have to worry just yet. It will depend on your circumstances, there are a lot of angles on this. How well your mother does with the rehabilitation etc. When they get to the point where they are asking you to find her somewhere to go, then be prepared to give them the run around. Don't agree to anything until you know what the implications are. The are full of sh***t about rehabilitating and sending people home to cope, with their "so called" help with personal care at home. They expected 1 person to put my mother to bed in 15 minutes, well if you have any experience of Dementia then you know that that is not achievable. Good luck UNQUOTE

Dan, You say the excessive charges are meant as a deterrent (for which statement your employers will not thank you, by the way) and that, if they were not applied, then everyone would just go into more and more debt. I have lived in the Netherlands, and worked for a bank there, where such charges are illegal (not just unlawful, as they are here), and I can therefore allay your fears: people there do NOT just go further and further overdrawn. It's very simple: the banks simply do not allow the payment to go through. The whole payment system is the other way around there anyway, but this aside. I had no problem with this as I had never had an overdraft before I moved there anyway. They are expressly forbidden by law to charge for any statement, advice note or letter they may send you. At the same time, they are obliged by law to inform you in writing (in practice they send a statement) every single time any material transaction takes place on your account - last time I looked, 'material' meant around the £25 pound mark. Banks may charge punitive levels of interest on unauthorised overdrafts, such as 20 to 25% apr, and they do. But figure out the charge on, say, £10 over the limit for a week: £10 X 25% = £2.50 for a year / 52 = 4.8p for one week. They don't hand out chequebooks, saying they're oldfashioned (they said that 25 years ago), but seperate cheques with a guarantee card: starting with 5, then 10 or maybe 25 at a time, if you've proven you use them responsibly. If you overdraw, they make you wait 'till you're in the black before you can have any more cheques. If you keep doing it, they won't let you have cheques again for a long time. People don't use them much anyway; you'd never send them by post to pay a bill and most people have been paying by card and PIN in nearly all shops there, for the past 25 years. When I went overdrawn there, (which was not often) I got stern letters informing me of the fact and warning that payments from my account would stop if I didn't clear the account - that was the extent of the punishment. When a standing order was blocked, there was no charge for this. Occasionally, I got invitations to arrange an agreed overdraft limit (for which the interest was not punitive) or a personal loan. Contractual, compelling penalty charges ARE allowed under Dutch law in general, just not allowed for banks. And oh yeah: the banks over there still manage to make obscene profits. The ONLY reason for allowing unauthorised payments to go through, as all the banks do in England, is to lead customers into debt and make money out of doing so.

Great link there, thanks. My mother is currently in hospital after a severe stroke two weeks ago. She is coming up for assessment (of recovery/ability/skills) soon and clearly will not be able to live on her own anymore. This means I am just entering this minefield. Should I start a thread for this or just take it 'outside'... i.e. follow the link and keep it out of this forum? Edit: starting own thread for this.

Yes! Someone HAS noticed the shakespearean reference there.

In Crawley, there is a leisure park comprising cinema, various restaurants, a bowling centre, etc. They have a gigantic car park, the some sections of which were half empty even at the busiest times. Therefore, some citizens took to using these unpopular areas of this car park for free as an alternative to exorbitant charges (minimum £1.50, even for five minutes) nearer the main shopping drag. This January, they put up little signs here and there in their car parks, which many failed to notice. They now employ 'security' staff to monitor all the cars coming and going and to rush out there with the clamping van, presumably as soon as they see a car's occupants heading in the wrong direction. There are those, not in the know, who go and see a film but discard their tickets before returning to find their car clamped. There is a point to all this, I promise! They charge £125 to remove the clamp (or 155 if they have to tow it away, plus 25 a day storage). It's this: is this not in conflict with the law against penalty or punitive charges being imposed without having been awarded in court, or used to compel compliance?

Further to the ranting above, I have been going through my statements and found that there were some more excessive charges within this century. I'm concentrating on going after a credit card first, who took (current estimation) over £1000 off me in the course over three years, but I'll be getting to HSBC in time.

Thanks for this actual website name. I had spent so long fruitlessly searching the Library forums for this. Perhaps it got restructured to somewhere else when the site changed - ? Howsoever, many thanks also to Jonni2bad for the list of major players - you beat me to it. Perhaps these could be listed somewhere in the Library under contacts or something?

And in that forum, there's an ad for a professional charging 33.33% of any bank charges they get back for you. Talk about cheeky - and some of us thought that charging £1 on Ebay for the information was worthy of threatening legal action.

Interesting tip about not confirming date of birth and postcode. I have thought of trying that but never did, yet. I have merely said, on occasion, that I did not wish to discuss this now and I would get in touch myself. I have tried saying that they should put everything in writing, particularly when arrangements made during one phone call seem to have been forgotten a few days later when another individual from the same company phoned to harrass me again; this has happened on more than one occasion. I have been told by one credit card company that they don't send out anything in writing (didn't know whether to laugh or scream at that one); the same one told me they refused to cease phoning me. I too have had my share of health problems - depression, in my case. My only advice is: try to not take it personally.

As stated above, the bulk of these charges ocurred sadly too long ago for recourse now. Hence the title of this thread: it's an impotent rant I did read the FAQs before posting anything but I cannot promise to have memorised the contents. Also, I must admit that I have not read all 14,400 odd posts on here - I see here and there a statement that this will take two days but I think it will be rather longer than that. I still have only scratched the surface after a week or so. I can't spend as much time on it as I'd like so I haven't got to the stage of counting up everything various banks/credit cards owe me yet. Life goes on and I have distractions such as trying to survive from day to day, looking after a family and then there's my mum's affairs to arrange; she just had a severe stroke.

I returned to this country 8 years ago, having lived 20 years (all my adult life) in the Netherlands - where gratuitous penalties are illegal and banks are obliged to send immediately a statement for each material transaction (anything over about £25, I think) on your account - and they may never charge for statements, advice notes or letters. Imagine my surprise then on finding that I was quickly incurring on my new HSBC account here massive bank charges of which I was totally unaware until I received my monthly statement. It had gone something like this: Being unable to find work straightaway, and being a single parent, I was on income support. I trustingly arranged DDs and SOs for regular expenses. One day, I checked the balance of my account to make sure I had enough to cover an upcoming SO. There was going to be a shortfall and so I nipped into the bank and paid in enough to cover this with a few quid to spare. Unfortunately, I had forgotten another payment and this led to my being overdrawn by around £3 for approximately 10 days. This gave rise to a penalty of around £25, which meant my next DD could not be met, was reversed and in turn cost me around £30. This was followed by several more automatic payments, with me depositing what I knew to be more-than-sufficient amounts to cover them, blissfully unaware of the gathering storm. When my statement turned up, it was accompanied by a nasty automatic letter demanding immediate payment of all the money I owed them.... by then over £500. In addition, I was incurring interest charges, and in some cases penalties and bad blood with my creditors who had not received their money. I went into my branch to discuss this and the manager smilingly dismissed my opinions that they had been secretly stealing the money I'd lent them, then helpfully insisted that I sign a managed loan agreement to pay off these charges. I fumed but presumed (wrongly) that there was nothing I could do about it. I paid the loan off in two years. Sadly, all this was too long ago now. But it gets better. Shortly before one Christmas, due to an error by someone at the benefits office, my IS was cancelled. The letter informing me of this was held up in the Christmas post so the first I knew of it was four days before Christmas Day, when the post office took away my book and told me I was scr***ed. Luckily, I was able to turn to relatives to tide me over but not before incurring more excessive penalties on my bank account. The benefits were sorted out in January and I received a Giro for just over £300, which I duly cashed. Foolishly, I kept only some change and deposited £300 into my bank account; this was on a Thursday. On Saturday morning, my Switch card was refused at the supermarket. Rushing to the ATM to check my balance, I found the machine swallowed my card. The bank manager apologised on Monday, after checking my account and confirming that it had been in the black for over six months apart from a brief hiccup at Christmas (which I had explained to them). He said they'd simply forgotten to remove the old 'bad, bad customer, take card away ASAP' instruction from the system. I said this was hardly good enough, seeing the amounts they charge me when I make a mistake - how much was he going to give me in compensation. £10 was the answer. Looking back, I should have asked for more, and even gone after them for emotional and material damages (e.g. having no food for the weekend). I'm not sure exactly how long ago this episode was but I'm going to be looking through my records this weekend to find out. More recently, they excelled themselves. They offered me an 'account review' which turned out to be them touting for more business. I was by then earning pretty regularly and I said I'd like to see the preliminary proposal (I forget what they call it) they offered concerning a mortgage for me to buy my council house. A week or so later, I was alarmed by a notice to go to the post office and pick up an item sent from the HSBC. This involved a special trip into town and parking fees while the post office is in fact right next door to my HSBC branch. It turned out to be their mortgage proposal - the only reason I had to collect it was that it had INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE ON IT!! I certainly won't be giving them my mortgage business. But why have I never changed my bank? Why bother - they're all as bad as each other.

Does anyone know about this? "the debt firm were quite helpful but said they could not get involved with the detail behind the arrears" What is the legal position on this? I.e. NTL ignore you because they've instructed a debt collector, who in turn refuses to discuss the details of the debt. Since the customer is disputing the debt, to whom is the fact of this dispute to be addressed? Couldn't the collection agency be co-liable (or something) for enforcing an unlawful debt?