We have been complaining for some time now about the charges on our account and had independently mentioned that the charges were excessive and in effect punitive. We have had a torrid time with Member Account Servicing and in particular Sarah Watson, Team Manager. We see she has a mention elsewhere. We were offered a refund of £100 with a cheque enclosed but we returned it. This was all before we found your site. We have now sent the Preliminary Approach letter today and await the reply with interest. In fact we are interested in whether Sarah Watson will be replying within 14 days as she normally takes 28 or so. We seem to also have a disproportionate number of our letters go missing!

Suddenly it seems not only were we right in the first place but Nationwide and in particular Sarah Watson was aware of this too.

Send your letter, stick to your deadlines. If Sarah wants to catch up, that is a choice for her. She will soon start to realise that 14 days does mean precisely that.

I am having problems with Nationwide letters too.

They said they had sent a reply...a week letter apologised saying it was now sent (1st march) and what do you know, it is still not here.

Dumbasses

You should have taken the £100 however and just removed it from the debt they owe you. That shows how calculating and exact you are in your methods. As long as their was no clause stating that you will have no further retribution.

The letter said full and final settlement so we sent the cheque back. We should have kept it but made clear it was only part payment. Still we have started the action now

You were right to send it back

Ah, yes, as above

Since we started our claim we sent the preliminary letter by recorded delivery dated 12 March. We did not get a reply. We sent the letter before action by email to Charles Bacon on 1 April. We also copied it to the Collections department as they were pressing us (we have taken all our money out of the account and left the full overdraft. We then said we would negotiate how much we would repay as we thought that gave us some more strength. This was all before we found the forum).

On 9 April we sent them a little reminder - usual thing about the clock ticking etc. We have now had a letter from Sarah Watson (bless her!) saying our complaint was being referred to the Member Services Department. Interestingly she said she had not received our letter of 12 March. This is the third time she has said this to us. Out of about 10 letters, 3 have not been received!!!! A well worn excuse we think.

Now I don't know what everyone feels is their experience of Member Service Department or Member Account Servicing where Sarah Watson lives but we took the view that we don't care who they refer what to and we have told them this in the past (especially the very rude young man we complained about earlier this year for whom we identified a 'training need'). Our clock is ticking and has nearly reached the time to ring that alarm bell (sad it's Easter and the Courts are closed). We sent another e-mail today saying

We have received your letter dated 10 April 2006. We are frankly shocked that you continue to claim our letters have not been received. This seems to be the third such letter. Fortunately our letter of 12 March was sent by recorded delivery and delivery has been confirmed by the Royal Mail. It is now clear to us that this as well as all our earlier 'lost' letters are in fact with your organisation somewhere.

 

We would remind you that our email of 1 April 2006 stated

'We require repayment in full of this money plus amounts charged later. If you do not comply fully within 14 days then we shall begin a claim against you for the full amount plus interest plus our costs and without further notice.'

This deadline expires today. We shall therefore take steps to lodge this claim with the Courts next week unless you have refunded us in full by 21 April 2006.

 

Furthermore we have not had any response to our letter of 2 March 2006 in which we returned your cheque and an unopened incorrectly addressed letter. Are we to assume this has also been 'lost' within your organisation? We still require a response to the specific complaints in that letter.

 

In view of your ability to lose all our correspondence we attach further copies for your information. Please be aware that whilst the Financial Ombudsman Service will not be able to deal with our claim (as you are aware the matter of unlawful charges is outside their remit and we are unclear why you have therefore referred to them in connection with such a claim) they will be able to rule on your continued ineptitude in handling our legitimate complaints. Accordingly unless we receive a full response and refund bringing this to a conclusion by the end of this month we shall proceed with a formal complaint to the Ombudsman Service for the excessive time you are taking to deal with our complaint and the disregard you intend to give to our legitimate request.

Let's see what reply we get if any... it could always get lost in the ...ether!

After the last posting we have sent a few emails to Nationwide. The best we got by way of reply was one from a new person (Pat Everatt) saying papers were sent to her by Sarah Watson. The 8 week time limit to deal with the complaint has passed and we have right to ask the Ombudsman to review the case. Nationwide would still like to review and asked for 28 days. We sent back email and said if they have the papers, then 14 days is more than enough.

We received a letter this (yesterday!) morning from another person (Lee Clarke). It is long and to be honest a bit rambling and the basic gist is 'sod off, the best you are going to get is £100. T&C's etc'

The thing is we need to make a decision and we are not sure what is the best thing to do. We would welcome other people's thoughts before we act.

In a poetic moment I wrote a posting about our plight and you can read it here

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=4724&page=3

post No 24

The position now is that in January we withdrew all our money from the account up to the maximum overdraft level of £2,500. It now stands at about £2,650 or so with the difference being solely charges. Before we found this site we had offered to pay £600 to them. This was based on the return of our charges plus similar charges by the payee of each direct debit and something for our difficulties. (We didn't know about the CAG argument then)

When we issued the preliminary letter we calculated the charges as just over £1,000. This will have risen to about £1,200 with the increased overdraft to date. We have largely been overdrawn most of the time and there will have been interest charged on us in the region of £400 at 16% overdraft interest rate. If we take this to court there will be further interest of approx £200 plus costs of over £100. So we now have a potential claim of £1,900 which fits very nicely with our original proposal to pay £600 back in January this year.

We have threatened court action but not actually done so yet for two reasons. Firstly I have an exam in June and I should be revising (and not be up at 1am posting lengthy notices here). Secondly we read the thread of Robertxc and wondered if at this stage if we would be better waiting for Nationwide to take us to Court.

So what we want to know is what is the views of others. What are the pros and cons of each approach. I am not fully sure if the numbers here would leave us vulnerable given that we have offered and are likely to have to pay £600 to the Nationwide. Could that leave us vulnerable to an adverse credit reference. We have told them this is in dispute and the reply we received says they do not agree (as if they have the right to rule on this - I think that's a bit beyond their remit but again I'm not sure if they have the power to do this) I suppose I am not sure if the amounts involved mean we could not say the overdraft is substantially made up of unlawful charges as it only represent under half of the amount of the overdraft and if the interest they have charged us is included it is still only 60%. Would this make it harder to argue for the adverse credit reference to be removed if it has been registered?

Any inspiration out there? Bankfodder, Dave and Robertxc - I hope you don't mind but I have pm'd (is there such a verb?) you to have a look at this posting if you get the chance.

OK, after some very useful replies and much consideration we have now submitted our claim via Moneyclaim. Total amount including interest £1706 plus costs. We are going to write to Nationwide again to tell them what we have done and to send them a cheque for £600 we estimate we owe to them. This together with the refund we will receive will clear the account.

We have included in the claim that we require any data lodged with any credit reference agency to be removed just in case but expect there to be none at the moment.

We will also say they cannot tell us the amount is not in dispute. It is not their decision. We will also include the paragraph in the templates giving notice of S10 of DPA just to give weight to the fact.

We think that covers it all. Thanks for every one's support!

Right, a progress report!

We sent our correspondence via e-mail and offered the £600 but didn't actually send it because we used e-mail. That was on 31 May. We sent it to Charles Bacon, Collections Dept and Lee Clarke (the last person to write to us). We had a letter back from Lee Clarke dated 5 June saying £100 offered in compensation. Take it or leave it. We sent him an email saying we were disappointed he had chosen to ignore all of our complaints, reminded him about the S10 notice and that the claim was now in court.

So when an envelope arrived on Saturday morning we didn't really think much of it. However when we opened it, it was from Sarah Watson (returned back into the fray - we have almost missed her for quite a time). It was dated 2 June so had taken a week to get to us! It was very short and to the point.

"I am now able to confirm we have refunded the charges, cancelled the pending charges and credited the £120 costs". To say we were stunned is a bit of an understatement!

We were so floored we didn't know what to do next. Anyway we eventually calmed down enough to look at the numbers and they have refunded us in full!!!!

So we have written back today by email to Sarah Watson, Charles Bacon & Uncle Tom Cobbley saying we acknowledge the offer of refund. We have told them that the deadline for a defence in court is 3 July (they acknowledged the claim on 9 June). In the meantime we still need confirmation about any incorrect data with any credit reference agency. We also require access via on-line facilities to be reopened so we can see they have refunded and we want the account restoring to full use as it was their actions that caused it to be restricted in the first place (we had a no withdrawal notice and no on-line access slapped on the account following our complaint as it went over the limit and we had stopped the income and direct debits on the account) Once these are confirmed we will withdraw our action.

In the final paragraph we have pointed out that we have been treated very badly throughout and we have complained about this (as a separate matter to the claim). So far we have been offered £100 in compensation. We suggested £500 and we will not refer it to the Ombudsman. This is based on the fact that the Ombudsman will charge them £350 if we complain whether they agree with us or not - but we didn't tell the bank we know that.

So all in all, I think we can safely say we have won this one, just waiting now to get everything sorted to bring the claim and the complaint to a conclusion.

So Saturday was a good day all round. Good result against Nationwide, England won their opening match and the Jones family won two levels at a local orienteering event!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!! mrs or mr jones? either way well done!

Actually it's both! Thanks very much - feeling a bit smug still!

Is the money in your account yet ?

Don't know. I can't get it on line and I do not have a statement. I have asked for access to be restored to prove receipt and until I can I won't be taking the claim out of court. Let's see how they respond to that.

Thanks for the concern. Thankfully no I haven't let them off the hook yet. I intend to give them a bit more of a hard time and if I ever get the chance when all this is finished I might even look at the period earlier than 6 years. Serves them right for being so evil to us!

This topic was closed on 03/06/19.

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