Hi guys, I could do with some help with this one, please... I travel on business every week and, in doing so, rent a car from the same hire company at the airport. Just before Christmas I had a car for a few days, which I returned around 5.30am on a Saturday. Somehow, though, in my rush to catch my flight I managed to lose the keys and, as there was nobody around at that time in the morning, had to call the rental company to let them know, once I landed in London. I always take full collision damage waiver on the cars I hire, simply because the first couple of times I hired they tried to keep my deposit, blaming me for damage already done to the car before I rented it. Fortunately I had noted the damage and their onsite agent had signed the rental agreement to confirm this, so I got the money back. CDW, they told me, clears me of any liability for damage to the car, reducing any excess to £0. Anyway, getting back to the current problem - I called the rental office and reported the keys lost. As I had full insurance I was told not to worry, as I would be covered. However, last week I received an invoice from them, charging me £95 for the lost keys. I contacted reservations and the girl I spoke with checked things out and confirmed that I should not have been charged. She put me through to customer services, but the next girl I spoke to told me a completely different story, saying that the keys were not covered by the insurance and that the £95 charge was standard. Now, I have looked through the CDW policy and have read the terms and conditions of the rental and there is nothing in there to state this charge. After arguing the case with various customer service agents, I asked to be put through to the supervisor. She agreed to do some more investigation and call me back, which she did. She argued that the keys weren't covered as they were considered 'an accessory' to the vehicle. Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but it's rather tricky to for a car to perform it's intended function in life without a set of keys, so can they really be considered an accessory?! Her argument is that, as the keys are considered an accessory, I had a duty of care to look after them. There is a section in the contract about this, but it doesn't really back up her case and, more importantly, another section of the terms states that the maximum liability for loss or damage to "the vehicle or its accessories is limited to the price paid for CDW and the excess payable, where CDW has been purchased." Now, I see this as pretty straight forward, in that the terms and conditions state that I am covered, but the hire company don't see it this way, so it looks like I am going to have to fight with them over it. I really can't believe they are being so obtuse over £95, bearing in mind that I spend about £800 a month with them. Has anybody else had to deal with anything like this? I don't really want to have to go down the small claims route with this, but if it comes to it, I will... I received a final email from the company on Friday, stating that the CDW did not cover accessories and that that was their final word on the subject. Should I now put my comments in writing and issue an LBA? I have asked to speak to somebody more senior, but they are apparently always 'busy', or 'out of the office'. I really don't know where else to go with it. Any advice would be gratefully received. I have a copy of the Ts&Cs on my office laptop, along with the email they sent, so will post these tomorrow, but in the meantime, if anybody has any thoughts, I'd like to hear them.

Good luck! I'm at much the same stage with Lloyds TSB, so fingers crossed they give us our money back!

No real update yet, but I spoke to my bank via phone banking and they advised that I would have to take up my complaint with the branch where I took out the loan. I was up in Glasgow yesterday, so I popped in and explained why I was there. Within a couple of minutes I was whisked off to the manager's office, where I explained my case and, to be honest, she couldn't have been nicer. She has asked that I put my complaint in writing to her and said that phone bank should have advised me to send a note of my complaint to the complaints' department, rather than the branch. Typical banking incompetence, I suppose, but I will write the letter anyway and hand it in to her next week. Just to cover myself, though, I'll also submit CCA and S.A.R to the bank. I'm going on holiday for a couple of weeks, so hopefully something will be waiting for me when I get back. I guess I can only live in hope...

It should be cancelled straight away and your payments should be reduced to take this into account. However, if they mis-sold it to you by not fully explaining the benefits or by insisting that you take the PPI as a condition of the loan, you can insist that they remove the PPI and any associated charges from the loan altogether. I would call and discuss it with them first. If they cancel it staright away and there is little or no financial penalty then you have nothing to worry about, but if they try to hit you with additional charges or front-load some of the PPI cost, there are other ways to deal with that.

I'd suggest contacting the AA loans dept. and telling them that you wish to cancel the PPI. The new rules work in your favour, so you shouldn't lose too much money. Why are you cancelling? Was it mis-sold, or do you just not want it anymore?

Hope it's all going well today. Looking forward to an update!

Thanks, Alan. I'll download the spreadsheet and do it this way.

Right, I've done some more calculations and compounded the interest, as the bank have done, over the 7 years that the loans have been running. Obviously they wouldn't have been charging daily interest on just the principle, but on the principle plus any interest already charged. This gives a total figure of £5276.88 based on calculations through January 2008. So, had they not mis-sold me PPI in the first place, and assuming I had paid the same amounts, my loan, which has a current balance of £8518.12 would only have £3241.24 outstanding! As I'm assuming that all of my payments have been applied to the loan, rather than the PPI in this case, I can't claim any interest on payments.

Okay, I’ve been looking at this and have worked out some figures. Please let me know if I am making sense here – I borrowed £8,000 at 14.8% APR on 02/12/2000 and a total of £1875.89 was added to the loan for PPI. Now, although I made payments to the loan, I never actually paid it off. In December ’05, an outstanding balance of £6545.97 was transferred to a new loan. In theory, had PPI not been applied up front, all of my payments would have gone towards paying the cash portion of the loan off, so to keep this simple, I should just assume that I never actually paid anything towards the PPI and should, therefore, just apply interest to that year on year at 14.8%, until the transfer date. This would give the following – Original Loan £1875.89 + 1838 days of interest at 0.041% / day - £3273.94 Had the PPI not been applied to the loan, the amount outstanding that would have been refinanced in Dec. ’05 would have been £6545.97 - £3273.94, plus the cost of other borrowings that were taken into account at the time. The interest rate on the new loan, which is still running, is 13.9%, so I can calculate the additional interest applied to the PPI portion that was transferred to the new loan, up to today’s date, as follows – Refinanced Loan £3273.94 + 751 days of interest at 0.038% / day - £4210.27. The amount outstanding on my current loan is £8,518.12. What that tells me is that if I not been charged for PPI the outstanding balance on my current loan would be £4307.85, as all of my payments would have been applied to the existing loan. I could work out exactly what I had paid proportionally to the PPI portion of the loan with each payment and calculate interest on that, but any additional interest I gain on that money paid would be more or less cancelled out by the reduction in interest applied to the reducing loan balance, so I would end up with a similar, although slightly lower, figure. If I go down this route, I can’t really justify adding 8% pa to the payments I have made, as I would then consider them to have been applied to the original loan amount, which would be considerably reduced by any refund the bank gives me. Does anybody have any suggestions around this? Am I being too nice to them…? If I do add the 8% rate to the amount owed, is that a flat rate? Do I add 8% to the total amount for each year of the loan (i.e. 56% of the overall amount paid over 7 years), or do I add it to PPI portion of each loan payment based on the amount of time elapsed since the payment was made? I hope this makes sense…! Please feel free to ask any questions and feel free to be blunt if I am talking nonsense

Great, thanks for the advice. I'll get to work on the spreadsheet and figure out just exactly how much these bloodsuckers owe me!

Thanks, Alan. Should I add that 8% when I send the LBA and let them know how much I'm claiming, or should I wait until it gets to the court stage? I seem to remember reading something on here which said that I should wait...

Great news! Congratulations

Hi folks, I'm about to emabrk on a claim against Lloyds TSB for PPI on a loan sold to me back in Nov. 2000. I borrowed £8,000 and was told by the chap selling it to me that I wouldn't get the loan without PPI, as I already had another loan with the bank. As I was self-employed at the time I knew it wouldn't be any good to me, but I needed the money so went along with it and tried to convince myself that I was doing the right thing. A couple of years later I realised how stupid I had been and how much money I was wasting, so I contacted the bank to complain that the PPI was no use to me and had been mis-sold. Like so many people on here I was told that the only way to cancel it was to re-finance the loan. At the time I had fallen behind with a couple of payments due to going through an expensive divorce and couldn't afford to bring them up to date and was told that I couldn't re-finance without doing so. In the end a compromise was reached, after another 6 months of arrears had built up, where I paid reduced payments for 6 months and, assuming I kept to the payment schedule, they would allow me to take out another loan to pay off the first, which I did. However, when they offered me the new loan, it included the outstanding balance of the existing loan, including the PPI portion. As my original loan was so far in arrears, I foolishly just went along with it. Having heard so much about this on the news recently, and finding lots of useful information on here, I haved decided to try and claim back the cost of the PPI and any interest as I should never have had to pay it in the first place! To make this even more infuriating, the chap who sold me the loan left the bank shortly afterwards to set up some kind of private practice. He and his business partner were both convicted on mortgage fraud charges a couple of years later! Anyway, I contacted the bank last week and asked them to send me out information on my loan. As it is so old they have, understandably, had to request copies of the original credit agreement from whatever department they come from, but they have provided me with a statement of the loan, including the original amounts, so I have figures to work with. The original loan amount was £8,000 at an APR of 14.8%. On top of this they have charged £1875.89 for PPI and added this to the cost of the loan, bringing my total borrowing to ££9,875.89. The loan was taken out on 02/11/00 and was due to run until 31/12/07, but was refinanced in December 2005, with a balance of £6545.97 outstanding. As I have all of the figures I need, I'm assuming that I can ignore the S.A.R - (Subject Access Request) and go straight to the LBA. I'd be grateful for any advice here... As far as interest is concerned, I still need to work it out accurately, but I'm guessing that I should work out the amount charged on the original loan until the settlement date and allocate the correct proportion to the PPI, then do the same for the new loan. Working things out roughly, it looks like I paid about £1170 in interest on the PPI part of the original loan and about £270 to date on the portion transferred to the new loan, so that gives a total somewhere around £3315 paid towards the PPI costs to date. Ouch! That's a lot of money for something that was never going to be of any use to me. I'd appreciate any advice you guys can give me on this, especially from anyone who has successfully claimed against Lloyds TSB so far. I'll keep this thread updated with any progress. Thanks in advance!!

Perky, I take great offence at this. Just what exactly do you have against monkeys...? For those of you being persecuted by these charlatan companies, I just thought I'd give you my experience. I live in E16, just beside Canary Wharf and paid £15,000 each for two parking spaces in my development, as there is a double red line on the private road outside my flat. Two years ago the concierge decided that they would invite a parking company in to patrol the car park and ticket any cars not displaying a permit. Unfortunately the permits are not fixed and often slide off the dashboard, in the same way that non-sticky pay and display tickets do. However, I do park my car in the same space every day, it is very recognisable and it is always the same person who patrols the car park, so he is well aware that my car is entitled to be there. Since ticketing started, I have received over 50 tickets. If I leave my car without a permit and don't use it for a few days, I can come back and find 7 or 8 tickets on the windscreen. It's just ridiculous! At first I got quite worried about the situation and had many irate phone calls with the company responsible, but having ignored every ticket and threatening letter they have sent me to date, with no consequences, I now just laugh it off, safe in the knowledge that they are spending a small fortune in stationary and postage costs. All of my cars are registered at my address in Glasgow, so every week when I go back there, I have a few more letters waiting for me threatening all sorts! I now have around 300 letters from Central Ticketing and various official sounding solicitors and debt collection agencies, but they will never see a penny of my money. I guess the point I am trying to make is quite simply that their bark is far worse than their bite, so if you do receive a ticket, stand your ground. Do not give in to them!

Guys, I really wouldn't worry about this. I now have 57 tickets outstanding from Central Ticketing. You see, they 'manage' parking in the development where I live, so, despite paying £15,000 for each of the three parking spaces I bought, and despite the fact that I park the same cars in the same spaces most nights, they still stick a 'ticket' on my windscreen if I ever forget to attach my permit. The trouble is, the concierge only issues one permit per space, so if my cleaner needs to park I have to give her my permit and I almost always forget to stick it back in my car! I get constantly bombarded by demands from them, but obviously I never pay, so eventually i start receiving more rubbish from their 'debt collection agency' threatening all sorts. However, it never goes any further, although I'd be delighted to take it to court, if it ever got that far...

Hi Jayne, Can you provide some details of the ticket so we can determine if it is a private or council issued ticket. By the fact that they are already threatening court proceedings and trying to intimidate you, I suspect that it is the former, but best be sure so somebody can give you the correct advice. Thanks, FM

Personally, I think you got what you deserved. You motorcyclists seem to think you have special rights. Seriously, though, I can fully sympathise with you and understand your argument, but unfortunately they can dish them out as often as they want. You could even have been sent four different fines for entering the same bus lane four times on the same day. It's a shame they don't follow the same rules as a NIP, which must be delivered within 14 days, following the date of the offence. That would at least have knocked two of them out.

If you had a couple of credible witnesses to place you and your car elsewhere at the time then they really wouldn't have an argument against it...

There is no minimum amount of time, I'm afraid.

Assuming this is a private ticket issued on befalf of a private company, and not on behalf of a local authority then it is lawful, but it is not backed by law, so they have no way of enforcing it. Private tickets rely on contract law, so while they will try everything they can to enforce them, all they can really make are empty threats of debt enforcement. I really wouldn't worry about it. have a read through the forum and you will find a wealth of information on this subject...

Getting the colour of the car wrong doesn't make a difference, I'm afraid, as it can be subjective and often mistaken.

Do you need a ladder to get into it...? (Sorry, couldn't resist!) They do still have to show who was driving the car, whether they consider the RK to be responsible or not. However, given that it was a hire car, unless there was somebody else on the insurance I would avoid going down that route and just stick to asking them to prove that you agreed to a contract and to explain their ridiculous penalty charges.

Excellent advice! Make sure you follow it, otherwise you will almost certainly be hit with the higher charge from the parking company, as well as an additional admin. fee from the hire company. You could always take a small claims action against the parking company to recover any monies paid by the hire company, but this would be a lot of extra hassle...

Great minds, Demon

Have a look through the various threads in this forum, here in particular. This sounds like a typical [problem] by a private parking company, with no back-up in law, so you shouldn't have to pay anything.