Q..  How do I reclaim my charges since the OFT Test Case?

A. Firstly, read the articles at  The Bank Charges Decision -Where to now  and at  .FAQ - The New Bank Charges Position

Make sure that you understand them

Q. Ok I’ve read the articles.  What do I have to do?

A. You will need to have written evidence such as Terms & Conditions or correspondence from your bank or court documents filed by your bank in which they represent their charges as reflecting their administrative losses or else being proportionate or as being fair and reasonable.

It is not worth beginning your claim unless you have collected this evidence.

After  a rethink and having come through a pessimistic period about bank charges, it seems that there may well be  a chance of recovering historical bank charges more easliy than I had first imagined.

In line with my other article,  Bank charges - where to now,   it is necessary to prove some unfairness.  But it has occurred to me that probably most of the banks have misrepresented their charges in some way.

Certainly none of the banks have ever admitted before that they earn 30% of their current account revenue from bank charges and that this revenue is used to cross-subsidise "free-banking" for others.

However, the banks did make this admission in the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court accepted this and it was for this reason that the banks won their case.

However, it may be possible to turn the tables.  It is the fact of this Supreme Court admission which finally and definitively gives the lie to all of the banks' earlier justifications that their charges were reasonable or that they merely represented their administrative costs.

The banks cannot go back on this admission.  To do so would be to admit perjury.

They may now be required to be obliged to explain why they they didn't tell this truth to their customers in the first place.

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