Barclays Bites Back

[skinttrev]

I received this letter today from Barclays after reading through comments on the forum about claiming back excessive bank charges - this was not the response I was looking for.

 

Can anyone advise me as to what to do next ????

 

Letter is copied below for your persusal........

 

Data Protection Act

 

I refer to your letter of 5th June, which was passed to me for comment due to your request for certain information under the terms of the Data Protection Act ("the DPA").

 

Please be aware that the Bank is not under any obligation to present information according to any particular format. Therefore, your request to assemble a schedule of charges is turned aside. Youmay of course obtain this data from copy statements and these will be supplied to you shortly without charge on this occasion. As the Bank is providing the copy statements on a complimentary basis your cheques are returned herewith.

 

As regards your mention of "manual intervention", the DPA does not oblige the Bank to comment about internal policies and procedures. Furthermore, in the context of managing day to day transactions arising from out of order accounts, the Bank does not hold the information you have requested in a form that would be covered by the DPA. Whilst aggregated information is retained for statistical purposes, this would not consitute "personal data" under the DPA and therefore would not be covered by a s.7 DPA subject access request. For the avaidance of doubt, the fact that we do not generally record information in a way that is caught by provisions of the DPA, is in no way an admission that there was no such manual intervention.

 

Notwithstanding the above, the Bank is of course entirely willing to supply the general information that should be disclosed due to the DPA. To initiate the process Barclays will require payment of a £10 fee per individual which should be provided by cheque, payable to Barclys Plc, directly to this department. Upon payment of fee(s) the relevant information will be supplied as promptly as possible.

 

Yours sincrerely

 

 

 

Peter Townsend

Manager, Barclays Data Protection

 

 

The letter was sent to - Data Protection, Radbroke Hall, Knutsford, Cheshire, WA16 9EU.

[williamh]

hi

 

thats the letter that i received so i sent this one..

 

 

Data Protection Act 1998

subject access request

Data Protection

Radbroke Hall

Knutsford

Cheshire

WA16 9EU Account no xxxxxxxxxxxx Sortxxxxxx

Dear Mr Townsend Date 3 June 2006

 

With reference to your letter dated 25 May 2006 I am returning the £10.00 cheque that you sent back to me.

Please note that my Data Protection Act request started from the date that you received my cheque on the 15 May 2006 and I expect the information requested to be sent within 40-days of that date.

Should there be any further attempts to delay compliance, I will be left with no alternative but to escalate this matter into an official complaint to the Information Commissioner and/or the County Court under s.7 and/or s.13 Data Protection Act.

 

Please supply me with a complete list of transactions and charges relating to my bank account from the last six years. Alternatively a complete set of bank statements for that period will be acceptable.

In addition, I require information on any or all occasions where a person has looked at my account and intervened to either stop or permit a transaction because I had gone over my limit, or indeed sent a letter due to any incidence resulting in charges applied to my account (as opposed to any automated systems that are in place).

If you are unable to supply data relating to manual intervention because there has been no such manual intervention then please be kind as to confirm this in your response to this request.

 

I request this information because I have noticed that your bank has registered a default notice on my experian credit report for £595.00, and I am puzzled to how these charges have been made.

 

If I find that from investigation from my bank statements that the default amount has been made from unlawful bank charges then I will require that you refund these charges and remove the default

 

 

 

 

 

Yours sincerely

williamh

 

 

you can just edit the bits you want

 

regards

 

williamh.

[skinttrev]

Thanks for that - I will send the letter off to them - did you send it recorded delivery ?

 

Have you had a response yet ?

 

We haven't had anything noted with any of the credit agencies as of yet, but we are writing the letter in respect of the fact that we have incurred over £500 of bank charges over the past couple of years, that to be quite honest with you, were a little shocking once we took the time to add them all up !!!

 

Do you recommend that we remove the paragraph that you have in your letter relating to the credit agency findings ?

 

Trevor

[williamh]

hi trevor

 

yes m8 I sent it recorded delivery

 

I have only just sent it so no response yet but I will keep you posted m8

 

 

"Do you recommend that we remove the paragraph that you have in your letter

relating to the credit agency findings"

 

yes as this relates to my personal circumstances.

 

please keep us updated and good luck

 

regards

 

william.

[skinttrev]

Just a thought - one of the accounts has a resolve loan attached to it - the reason behind the resolve loan is that we went overdrawn got excessive bank charges etc, to the extent where we could not pay it all back in one go - the bank offered us a resolve loan to clear the amount.

 

We are still paying this off, and have requested several times that the account be closed. We only use it to transfer money into to pay the resolve loan, as they have told us thay we cannot pay it via another account - they have stated that we must have a Barclays account open to pay the resolve loan.

 

1. Can we in fact close the account even though Barclays have said that we must keep ot open to allow the DD to go through for the loan and pay the loan via a seperate?

 

2. Can I claim for the excessive charges for the resolve loan too ? ( I have a feeling that the answer to this question is yes - but just wanted to double check ).

 

3. If so, do i have to treat it as another DPA ( for example send a serperate letter) , or include it on the relevant DPA letter that refers to the account it's linked to ?

 

Lastly but by no means least - I had a CCJ filed against me earlier this year and it refered to a store card - because of missed payments due to circumstances beyond my control - I got charged a load of fees relating mainly to late / missed payments - can I claim these back and get the CCJ overturned or at least reduced ?

[thecornflake]

1. Can we in fact close the account even though Barclays have said that we must keep ot open to allow the DD to go through for the loan and pay the loan via a seperate?

 

I'm not sure - i would have thought it doesn't matter where you pay it from but they may be special terms attached to it. If there are they may not be enforceable but you need to let us know what the exact wording of the loan agreement is in relation to paying it.

 

2. Can I claim for the excessive charges for the resolve loan too ? ( I have a feeling that the answer to this question is yes - but just wanted to double check ).

 

Yes, depending on the reason for the charges. late payment etc should be fine.

 

3. If so, do i have to treat it as another DPA ( for example send a serperate letter) , or include it on the relevant DPA letter that refers to the account it's linked to ?

 

Not entirely sure on this one. I presume you can include it on the one request but hopefully a mod can confirm this for you.

 

Lastly but by no means least - I had a CCJ filed against me earlier this year and it refered to a store card - because of missed payments due to circumstances beyond my control - I got charged a load of fees relating mainly to late / missed payments - can I claim these back and get the CCJ overturned or at least reduced ?

 

There are separate letters and information on the forum relating to CCJs/defaults - have a look in the FAQs - I think they're in there.

 

Good luck!

[skinttrev]

3. If so, do i have to treat it as another DPA ( for example send a serperate letter) , or include it on the relevant DPA letter that refers to the account it's linked to ?

 

Not entirely sure on this one. I presume you can include it on the one request but hopefully a mod can confirm this for you.

 

 

Is there an MOD that can advise me on this please ?

[barracad]

A single SAR request entitles you to all information an organisation holds about you, so as long as you make it clear what details you want from each account you can send one SAR and one payment.

[skinttrev]

Thanks Barracad. Will do. Off to the Post Office.

[skinttrev]

Have now posted all the various letters - will wait to see the outcome.

 

One last thing though - can anyone advise me what action / attitude to take with Barclays telephoning me ? They are calling me on the land line and on my mobile with reference my account being overdrawn ( mainly down to a number of charges I have to say). I have sent them a letter requesting that they refrain from calling me, as advised, together with the DPA letter, but they don't seem to listen.

 

I am getting very stressed and to be honest quite fed up.

 

Is there anyway I can restrict their calls with my telephone line provider ?

 

Any ideas ?

 

Anyone ???

[Movingon]

If you have written asking them to stop, and they continue, they are committing a criminal offence. What you should do is write a complaint to OFTEL with a copy to your local police HQ, (and the bank obviously) - and consider copying in the Financial Services Authority - setting out that they are committing an offence under the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949* because having asked them to communicate with you only in writing, they have continued to harrass you by telephone.

 

*There may also be an offence of Harrassment under The Administration of Justice Act, but I'm not sure when that offence applies as I haven't actually read the statute.

 

Make sure you get notes of times, dates etc, and if you get one, the number that called. The police (and probably OFTEL) will be able to access your 'phone records and see what numbers called anyway, but it's wise to get as much as you can.

 

Best of luck!

[skinttrev]

We are now coming to the end of our journey. Papers have been served on Barclays and we are awaiting patiently to what happens.

 

One question I would like to ask though - is when Barclays settles these claims, does the money go back into your bank account ( if you still have one open ) or do they post a cheque out ?

 

My reason for asking is that one of our accounts is overdrawn ( my wife ) and the other account is in Credit ( the joint ). My wife has a loan with Barclays which we are in the process of looking at as it seems that a proportion of the loan was made up of an overdraft amount being included and a resolve loan agreement drawn up.

 

My wife is concerned that because payments to the loan have stopped and are now in the hands of a collection agency ( due to financial circumstances ) that Barclays will pay the money from our claim into her bank account and then remove it again to make a payment towards the outstanding loan.

 

Are they able to do this ? Can anyone help ?

 

My wife knows that she has to pay the loan and is in the process of putting together a payment plan, but as the refund coming back from Barclays includes fees from both her accoutn and the joint account and now includes court costs, surely they cannot refund the amount and then 'snatch' it back again !

[rogerebaker]

Barclays will try and get you to agree to having the amount transfererred to your account.

 

Just refuse.

 

Tell them you want a cheque sent to your address

 

If they want to settle then its on your terms. There has been threads on the forum that have gone on for weeks on this very point and you will always win in the end if you insist.

 

Barclays are likely to take it to the very end a few days before the court date.

 

Keep going

[skinttrev]

Thanks for that - we will keep on going and insist that payment be by way of a cheque. In the mean time, we will clear the overdraft and close the account - just to be sure that they play by our rules and don't sneek a payment in the back door !!

 

Will keep you posted.... watch this space.