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Although all claims for the refund of bank charges have been suspended, the FSA has agreed with the banks that where their customers are in financial hardship, that their refund applications may be looked at sympathetically instead of merely being suspended along with all the other refund claims.
This sounds very good on paper. However in practice we are finding that most people who apply for charges refunds because of hardship are refused. We conclude that by and large hardship applications are unlikely to be successful.
There seems to be no pattern or formula for qualifying for a hardship refund. Many of our Users have been refused even though they are in serious circumstances or are even on benefits for themselves and for their children.
On the other hand we have even come across a few applicants who have succeeded in obtaining a partial refund even though they were not on benefits and in fact were in employment.
This is highly unsatisfactory. The FSA has set out no guidelines either to consumers or to the banks as to the circumstances in which an applicant qualifies for a hardship refund.
The sums which are refunded are generally never the full amount owed by the bank in charges and we have even come across some instances where banks have actually told their customers what they are to spend their refunds on!!!
The banks will always require a hardship applicant to complete a highly intrusive income and expenditure questionnaire. We have no idea to what other uses this information may be put or whether it shared with other third parties. We expect that it could be shared.
Don't forget that the bank charges are your own money.
By all means go ahead and ask for a charges-refund based upon hardship. However, don't bank on it. The process seems to be arbitrary and the banks give no explanations for refusal.
There is no appeal to the court or to the Ombudsman.
Here is a link to the main hardship application template:-
Please have a look through our library for many other helpful materials.
In particular if you are on benefits and your bank is still taking your money in charges then the letter which asserts your right not to have your benefits used in this way may be very useful to you:- Prevent your bank from taking your benefits (letter of appropriation)
For our useful guides and templates generally please go to:- Guides and templates
And of course, if you have any questions or you need some free help, go to The Consumer Action Group forum
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written by workingmumof3, October 16, 2009
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written by h1tm4n32, October 22, 2009
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written by h1tm4n32, December 05, 2009
http://www.baby-information.co.uk
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The bank seemed to be practising a bit of a money earning racket. I.e. a bank charge took me overdrawn. HSBC kept apply interest and charges til they were taking around one third of my salary.
Financial hardship over-rides the national issue of bank charges in the High Court.
I also instructed the accoutn be frozen and moved my salary BACS payment to another High Street bank. HSBC still tried to tak SOs and DDs from the accoutn and kept adding charges until these amounted to more than £2000 and kept pestering me as to how I intended settling the overdraft.