Can the Banks demand a promise not to complain in the future

[BankFodder]

A question was put up on the BankChargesHell Yahoo group which raises interesting issues.

 

It seems that Lloyds Bank has offered to refund some excessive charges to one of their customers on condition that the customer promised not to make any compaints or to sue about similar charges in the future..

 

the question was whether the courts would uphold such requirement?

 

I responded:-

 

You can certainly contract away your right to sue on an existing issue. Lawyers call it "forbearance to sue".

 

 

 

On the other hand you you can't use as a contractual bargaining tool something which you are required to do anyway. Lawyers call this "an existing duty".

 

So if it can be said that the charges are unlawful and the bank should not have taken them anyway, then the argument would be that they had an existing duty to return. To agree return the charges only after they had extracted a promise not to sue seems to me to require an unenforceable promise from the customer.

 

 

 

Another issue is whether you can agree to sacrifice future rights to sue on as yet unknown issues. I'm not sure what the answer is to this. Maybe Bob will post his view on this question.

[Guest]

Clearly the key is to NOT see this as the bank giving way, because anything with strings attached isn't a victory.

 

A victory against the banks is when they hand back the money they've taken unfairly with NO STRINGS ATTACHED. I won't accept any 'terms and conditions' and indeed when a manager at NatWest tried to make this a condition for a "good will repayment" on the phone, I told her that I would treat EACH new charge as a seperate event and would NOT be bound by any agreement we might reach on a particular event.

[BankFodder]

This topic was closed on 03/05/19.

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