How Much Are You Likely To Try Reclaiming In Excessive Bank Fees? Background To Reclaiming Your Bank Charges
In short, you can reclaim bank charges you have incurred within the previous 6 years. This includes excessive charges for being overdrawn, letters informing you about bounced cheques and failed direct debits and similar. If the action probably only cost the bank a little amount and they have charged you a lot more, then there’s a chance of a claim. If these fees have caused you to be hit by further fees or interest, then you will also have a case there.
As well as these, you can reclaim for interest on the amount you are claiming – the interest you would have earned on the money had it been in your account.
But how do you find how much the bank has charged you?
First, if you have stored your bank statements for the past 6 years then you just need to look through them. If you haven’t kept them all, if you are registered for online banking (or can register) then you may be able to determine the unfair fees from there.
Finally, if all of these are not possible then you have to go to your bank. Asking for copies of back statements can prove quite costly (and these fees DO NOT count as unfair!!!). But if you know exact dates of charges, then this might be a choice. But the usual way is to write to the bank, quoting the Data Protection Act 1998, requesting them to tell you for all charges on the account:
• what the offence was
• the date of the offence / fee
• the amount of the charge
The bank has, by law, only 40 working days to reply. But it is allowed to charge you a fee not more than £10, so it is worth while including in this letter the full £10 fee made payable to the bank.
If your bank tries to give you a copy of your statements they can try to charge you for that. To prevent this, be sure that you tell the bank you are using the Data Protection Act 1998 to get a list of all fees.
Expenses
You can also reclaim expenses incurred in making your reclaim, although this can be best left in case the claim gets as far as the court stage and then used as a bargaining tool to prevent that. Simply put, if the bank is told that you will accept repayment now, or repayment plus costs if they don’t accept that, then there’s a financial incentive to them to accept.
Reasonable fees include court fees and a case has also included costs of preparing the case. To claim for this, document a record of how much time you spend preparing your case then include a charge at £9.25 per hour (the legal entitlement).
RSS FEED