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Putting together the claim You may wish to write to your bank to demand a refund of the penalty charges before issuing court proceedings. That was effective in some cases in the past, but usually the customer was not offered a full refund. Now, with the test case in the system, banks will virtually never refund the charges voluntarily. If you want to pursue a claim at this stage, then you probably have to proceed straight to court proceedings. Starting the County Court process You can a claim form in one of four ways: 1. Obtain the forms from your local Count Court. The claim form that you require is an N1. You can find the address of the courts from your telephone directory: look for "Courts" but make sure that you go to the County Court not to the Magistrates Court. You can also find the address from the Court Service website at: 2. Download the form from N1 claim form. Save it to a folder on your computer. Note that this is a special kind of pdf file that you can insert information into and then print it out. But you cannot save the completed form. 3. Make the whole claim online through the Court Service online claim service. My recommendation is to use option 2. This provides you with a neatly printed form. You need to take 2 copies to the Court and print an extra copy for yourself. The online claim service limits the number of words that you can use and we have found that banks often use this as an excuse to try to say that the claim does not provide sufficient information and they try to get claims thrown out on technicality. If you use the other options, you can follow the recommended wording more closely and are less likely to have problems. The wording of the claims is fairly critical. Follow the suggested templates closely. See claim template on this site. (Note: I am in the process of updating the suggested wording in the light of what has happened in the test case so far. Please contact me by email for the latest wording.) The fees payable for claims vary according to the amount of your claim. The fees structure changed significantly on 1 October 2007. For latest, see Court Fees. A word of warning If you have an overdraft with your bank and the amount that you are claiming back from the bank is more than the amount that you presently owe the bank, then you can look forward to repaying the overdraft entirely once you have won the claim. However, if your overdraft is more than the amount that you hope to get back from the bank, you need to think through the process carefully. For example: you have an overdraft of £2000 and you are claiming back from the bank £1200. You win the case, the bank pays the money back into your account, but you still owe the bank £800. Even if that is within your current overdraft limit, the bank could withdraw the overdraft at any time and demand that you repay the balance outstanding. This would give you a problem. You need to plan ahead for this. Could you arrange an overdraft or loan from another bank now? If so, you should probably do this before you start your claim so that you have an escape route if your bank turns nasty - and they frequently do once they have been forced to repay charges. |
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In this section |
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Published and promoted by Bob Egerton, TR2 4RS |
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