This morning on checking online I find that I have been charged referral charges of £30 for April. The only times I went over the limit was when the bank charged £60 referral charges for March without any prior notification - I paid cash in to cover it as soon as I was aware - the following day. I also went over when a direct debit (to the bank itself) was made that had been cancelled five days previously because the loan for which it was set up had been paid off. Bank advised that it had not received enough notice to cancel the direct debit - it had received full payment of the loan for heaven's sake!!!!!

This is only the latest in a long line of charges. The bank made a mistake which cost us a considerable amount of time and expenses for which we have never received a penny in compensation. It has admitted its error but as a direct result of this we had financial expenses and found that the bank has been profiting from its own errors and we are still paying for it.

Well the bank has refunded the £30 charges with a letter explaining that it was not at fault - it had no duty to notify me of the £60 charges - I should have know about them beforehand. However, I have again been charged £30 because I went over with the £30 charges it charged before!!! Just cannot seem to win.

they have also now played another blinder. When we took out a bank loan it insisted that we take out a life insurance policy although we had insurance to cover about three times the amount of our borrowings but apparently these finished eighteen months before the loan ended. They would not let us take out a policy to cover what would be outstanding after 20 years repayment but insisted that we take out a policy for the full amount. This has cost us £90 a month for 15 years. I am sure we could have shortened the term of the loan but the bank wouldn't hear of it. I am sure the extra loan repayments would have been less than the amount of the insurance payments. The bank insisted that it had to protect itself etc. etc.

Well, anyway we sold the property and were able to repay the loan in full and wanted to cash in the insurance policy (there was a small savings element £5000). We got a quote from the insurance company that the policy was worth £5500 but they wanted the policy back from the bank before it would encash it. the usual blurb that the amount of the policy could change etc. Well we wrote to the bank (who should have returned the policy at the time of paying off the loan. No response - wrote again. Still no response and wrote again. Guess what - they lost the policy!!!! No apology - just a copy of a letter they wrote to the insurance company informing them that they should issue us with another policy. No (sorry but let us have a bill for the extra costs or anything). anyway the policy paid up - £600 less than the first quote.

Will write to RBS asking for their comments first but will be prepared for yet another battle with them.

I wrote to the bank asking why they had not responded to our letter, returned the policy and their comments on the loss of £600 on the value of the policy.

The response was that they did not have to return the policy unless we specifically asked and that policies encompassed all borrowings. When the business loan was taken out we were specifically asked to take out additional insurance even though we had more than three times the amount of the insurance needed, only the policies ran out about 18 months before the end of the business loan. We still had to take out a policy to cover the whole amount and not just the balance that would be outstanding for the last eighteen months,

The bank cited that the delay in returning the policy was due to the delay in receiving our letter (14 days in the post!!!! apparently) and had nothing to do with the delay in returning the policy. The policy was never returned - a letter from Sheffield said it had been mislaid - that in my opinion was the cause of the delay in replying to our letter. The response informing us that the delay was because of not receiving our letter came from Hull. I don't think that they knew of the letter from Sheffield as they totally contradicted themselves. Will now send them a copy of the letter from Sheffield.

I asked why they they had charged us two security release fees - in my opinion this was because there were two securities to release - the deeds and the insurance policy. But no - apparently they had taken two fees in error and refunded the second fee accordingly. They had never intended releasing the policy so they say, unless we specifically asked.

This topic was closed on 10 March 2019.

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