I had been with Natwest for 22 years and had a black account with the Gold Advantage Charge card.

I was advised to become a company as I would be delivering a service through several agencies.

Unfortunately, due to exceptional circumstances and include a bad personal relationship left me in debt

and I am about £8 -9k in mortgage arrears on a house I rent out and a personal overdraft that was £12k.

In 6 months that OD was cleared and both business and personal accounts were in the black.

The difficulty in meeting the mortgage department for an arrangement to be put in place

was mainly because this period was over the summer, they would meet with me after 5pm

and if I called at 4.45 they would not deal with me.

I sent in 2 income/expenditure spreadsheets but they clearly didnt see them

but I managed to set up a DD for the mortgage online and I met the deadline.

That evening all three of my accounts were closed.

I called the callcentre and they said they didnt have me on record.

I tried to log a complaint and they were too busy on the Friday

but promised they would be in touch the next day.

They never did.

As a prelude they stopped my access to online banking even though there was no way of spending money or transferring out into other accounts so it made knowing where I was financially and who had paid me and hadnt.

The worst thing is that I couldnt operate, I need supplies, sundries and I was without any money to buy food or even some milk.

I told Natwest this but they told me all my funds were transferred into the mortgage.

It took a further 3 months to work out what had happened and the cause was not offered to me by the bank whose level of investigation was looking at the screen in front of them whilst on the phone.

They hadnt cancelled the previous direct debit so every month the original arrangement would draw funds then the older previously arranged dd would be rejected. This was recorded as a default.

I tried to make it clear to them there was an arrangement in place,

it utilised a payment system set up and approved by the bank

and it was their job to find out where the money was disappearing to every month for three months instead they left it to me.

I complained about being oushed further into hardship by continued charges

I had no way of keeping track of as the online facility had been taken away four months before they closed me down,

failed to log 6 out of 8 attempts to complain and didnt care that I had not a penny for two weeks.

They tried to issue a repossesion order and I wrote in to the lawyer to say that was illegal

as the account was under dispute.

In the meantime, I asked for SAR to get all the account information and after three months all I have is mortgage account copies.

The lawyers are now calling me and I am sure its about instructing me to pay the arrears within the week

or they would issue a repossession order on the house.

They cancelled the direct debit that existed so I was conscious to keep puttting funds in every month

but trying to function without a bank account lost me more money and irretrievably lost more clients.

I am expecting a lump sum of money that will clear the arrears but the knock on effect

meant that I was late paying my suppliers and one has taken a county court judgement out against me

and bankruptcy is where I am at if I dont have some means of a reprieve.

Yes, they said that if i didnt have an arrangement in place my account woud be closed

and they talked about recovery.

Sounded to me it was going to get better!

The arrears werent as much as my overdraft which i cleared in less than 6 months

and they had said the the charge card was a different legal entity

and when I called the credit card company customer services before they closed my accounts

they said that there wasnt any money owed and that it would be fully operational

once the mortgage arrangement was in place.

That wasn't true and I also lost my 36,000 reward points as I had no online access

and frankly more serious things to worry about.

i cant really afford a litigation lawyer at the moment and have little faith in the FSA from what I am reading.

The banks replies to my complaints are to issues that weren't raised

and they have not taken notice of my plea to allow me access to funds I had to eat and drink.

I was not notified clearly that every account would be closed down

and as far as I am concerned there was an arrangement in place

that obviously isnt integrated into the RBS network as they couldn't see that the money

had been taken from the holding account and HSBC provided a fast pay reference number.

You cannot open another bank account if you have mortgage arrears is what every other bank told me

but once I called the Business Debtline they advised me to walk into a bank and ask to open an account.

Why didnt the other banks suggest this to me?

A week after submitting an application form for a Cashminder account with the coop

was i able to restart rebuiding what Natwest pulled down.

NW admit in a response to my complaint logged 11 April 2016

that they failed to comply with my Data Protection Act 1998 Subject access requisition dated 26 January 2016.

I had no reply and sent another reminder 11 April 2016 via Ascent Legal again and hard copy to NW,

and eventually this was acknowledged by the Complaints department on the 18 April 2016

merely to state they were to investigate with an outcome to the investigation

admitting to the failure to comply arriving 25 May 2016.

Ascent Legal, knew the background behind this SAR was because as far as I was concerned

the account was in dispute over charges and the banks ignorance to the 'online arrears repayment facility'

and claimed I defaulted on my mortgage repayments

only to realise that TWO DIRECT DEBIT MANDATES were attempted from the new arrangement date of 11 October 2015.

They forgot to cancel the previous DD.

Yet they still have advised NW to proceed to repossess the property

which was the judgement made in my absence on 14 May 2016.

How is this legal firm applying the PRINCIPLES as set out by their code of conduct?

I have sent another SAR on 6 June 2016 and am sure that this time they will provide me

with the information that I have requested, within the required period

because the judgement has been made but I will request a suspension of any warrant to evict me.

Furthermore,

I have filed an official complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner,

as well as the Financial Services Authority.

I am suppose to complain to Ascent Legal before reporting the matter to the Law Society

for the apparent inactivity or disregard of the aforementioned obligations

and also to proceed with their action against me for the repossession of my property on 14 May 2016.

If they haven't replied to the complaints so far in explaining how they can proceed

when the account is in dispute what is behind their confidence that they are not breaking protocol?

Hi tedd4

I have moved your thread out of NatWest and to a more appropriate forum in view of the repossession element of your thread.

Regards

Andy

old and new threads merged for history

dx

I raised a new information rights concern regarding the Natwest who didn't initially acknowledge the SAR request,

then after six months sent me a form to officially request the information about disputed defaults

but still went ahead and obtained a court order to repossess the property.

The ICO failed to send an initial response within 30 days.

I raised my concern about the way the Natwest delayed handling my personal information request and hence unlawfully proceeded with the court order when I didnt have a chance of proving my case without the information it held.

Natwest apologised for the delay then kept sending letters and asking questions to narrow down the information that would be sent, part of which was a request for a transcript of the conversations held

yet I received a CD which nowadays hardly any company includes in their computers and it costs to get transcribed.

The Natwest said it will send me the transcript - I am still waiting. However, it was the ICO's response that amazed me,

'I understand from your correspondence that you would like us to block the NatWest from the legal proceedings they are taking against you. Unfortunately this is not something we can do.

Where an individual raises a concern about a Subject Access Request (‘SAR’), we can contact the organisation, querying their response and if any information has been withheld, why this is the case.

As such, we can contact the NatWest, querying their response to your SAR and if they have withheld any information. However this would not stop any legal proceedings and we would be unable to assist in that particular matter.

Should you want us to contact the NatWest about this particular issue, you can inform us of this and we can raise your concerns with them.

I thought there were consequences that were automatically applied to institutions that don't comply with the law?

Certainly, their lawyers ignored it and got the outcome they wanted but it seems there is an exemption.

Of course I will ask them to proceed as stated but am I missing something about what I need to do to get the enforcement of the powers and purpose of the ICO?

I'm sorry to say – welcome to the real world!

The Information Commissioner's office is basically hopeless. They have lost sight of their role of monitoring and enforcing the human right of privacy per article 8 of the convention. They have fallen back into a kind of 0FT role of making markets work – which basically means making sure that business keeps on happening even if it means compromising the rights of individuals. They are also rather like the financial ombudsman service which seeks to implement fair outcomes – fair to both parties which basically means compromising on people's rights for the sake of business practice.

Regardless of that, I'm afraid that you are completely mistaken to expect that the information Commissioner has any power to block a legal action. You should have raised this during the court process and explained to the judge why this was significant and affected your case. You might also have wanted to sue the bank or at least counterclaim against them for their breach of your statutory rights under the Data Protection Act

IF I were to pursue suing the bank for breaching the data protection act and taking 10 months to honour my request

how do I go about quantifying the damages / distress I incurred as a result?

The bank namely illegally progressed the legal action action to get a repossession order knowing that the information I would need to represent my case would not be to hand and therefore the magistrate granted the order.

Sorting through the information given has taken a lot of time approx 60 hours and part of this included listening to a CD-Rom that the bank felt would be too costly to transcribe themselves. In other words, that cost was past onto me.

Obviously, the fear of having repossessed meant I had to take urgent action to settle the matter with any threats top NW Bank ceasing and not pursuing other related NW Bank issues e.g. account charges, the closure of my accounts etc.

I have had to remove the tenants from the property which has meant a loss of income and redecorate which was neither budgeted for this year nor was it planned but done so that it will attract funds that it deserves should it go to auction.

I have left out other costs such as the time taken to write the correspondence, the mailing etc but some idea as to what sort of funds I can look to reasonably ask for in damages would be gratefully received?

That is tricky. When NatWest provided the SAR info, would the data have helped you avoid any loss or costs ? You would need to prove this breach of your rights did cause you to suffer a loss. Then once you have proved this, you can move onto calculating loss value. This would be direct losses you suffered as a result of NatWest breach, that you would not have suffered had NatWest been compliant with the law. I don't think redecoration would be valid, as that has presumably increased or maintained value of property and it could be argued that NatWests breach had no bearing on whether you redecorated or not.

So write down a list of direct losses purely due to NatWest breach and post this up. Others who are more knowledgeable might then be able to comment.

I have noted that in previous cases of breach of the DAP on average an award of £750 have been made for damages. The distress caused is more difficult to quantify.

HOWEVER,

the chasing of the information and the drawn out process of the SAR took up significant amount of time.

Further impact of this REPOSSESSION ORDER meant I had to assume an eviction was imminent and therefore I had to remove the tenants in order to prepare the house for sale.

This was not planned

nor was the timing optimal given the same bank closed all the accounts;

I wish therefore to claim for:

- 3 months rental loss (£2600 pcm x3 = £7800)

- to assimilate the information and transcribe the CD-Rom (time for transcription 6 hours @ £120/hr= £700)

- this includes the the cost of additional correspondence and time spent preparing documents and seeking legal advice and time taken to chase the bank for the SAR data (3 hours @£120/hr=£360),.

Would it be regarded as reasonable by the courts?

I should add,

removing the tenants in order to prepare the house for sale the assumption being an eviction order was pending.

I was not in a position to risk them losing their home and becoming homeless.

This was not planned nor was the timing optimal given the same bank closed all the accounts.

This decision was taken unbeknown to me when or if this would occur as I was not informed by the bank that they sought to hold off the eviction until further notice.