[Sussex] Bank charges, important court case

[Andy Smith]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 08:43:14AM +0100, Andrew Guard wrote:
> The barrister Tom Brennan believes bank penalty charges are illegal
> and he try to get "exemplary damages". plus full refund. And the bank
> has no choice but to defend this action.

This sort of thing makes me quite uncomfortable.  I was a student
once.  I was terrible with money.  I always went over my overdraft
limit and got charged stupid amounts for it.  I wasn't much better
in the first few years of work after uni either.  Is that the bank's
fault?  I believe it was my fault and no one is to blame but me; I
would not dream of trying to claim any of it back.

After a few years ago being made redundant and spending some time
without work, not in poverty but really having to count my pennies
like never before if I wanted anything above the bare minimum in
life, well, that taught me to be more sensible with money.

I know there are lots of people really struggling and them being hit
with bank charges that mean they can never clear their debts is just
wrong, but it's hard to believe that this guy is or was one of them.

The article says he ran up £2,500 of charges on an unauthorised
overdraft.  I'm sure that did not happen overnight, so why did he
not speak to the bank and tell them he had no way of clearing it?
At which point I would hope they would close his account and he
could have gone through a process to repay over time, and operate a
reduced facilities account (i.e. no overdraft facility) in the
meantime.  If you ignore things then yes the charges mount up.

Of course we don't know the full story and maybe he did speak to
them, I don't know.  I just worry that somewhere along the line
personal responsibility is going out of the window.  If he wins this
case then banks will not dare to apply charges in case someone else
says they are unfair.  What then will they do?  Make it very hard to
get overdrafts?  Close accounts as soon as they start attracting
charges?

What other agreements will later be considered unfair?

Cheers,
Andy
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