The Story so far ....,
In the early 1990s I became aware that a large proportion of elderly people (in particular) had old style bank accounts which had become obsolete and that, as a result, these people were only being paid a tiny fraction of the interest that they really should have been receiving. After undertaking some research on this I realised that many of the banks and building societies appeared to be deliberately cheating their customers by renaming the savings accounts that they had been offering for new customers and then slashing the interest rate paid on the accounts bearing the old name without adequately informing their customers about the change.
As I was at that time standing as a Parliamentary Candidate in the forthcoming General Election I issued a Press Release to the national and local media in order to draw attention to what the banks were doing and this resulted in some excellent media coverage, including two full page articles in the Daily Mirror newspaper, and this was quickly followed by a press conference at the House of Commons a couple of TV interviews and several radio interviews.
The pressure on the banks which resulted from this and similar news stories which came to light subsequently eventually resulted in a major change in the way that the banks and building societies provide information to their customers about changes to their accounts.
This therefore was the first success story and the start of my Fair Banking Campaign.
In 1994 I wrote an article entitled "Getting back the Charges" which was founded upon my own personal success in reclaiming my own bank charges levied after the account went into an "unauthorised overdraft".
In this article, which can be viewed or downloaded in adobe acrobat format here: Getting back the Charges, I argued that the charges being levied throughout the banking sector were unlawful "penalty charges" and that the banks were, in law, only entitled to recover their actual loss in relation to the customer's breach of his bank's terms and conditions - if any such loss actually existed, which I argued was extremely doubtful given that most customers were already being penalised by higher interest rates and account service fees.
The article was published in the April 1994 "Financial Services" edition of a monthly legal journal, "The Legal Executive".
This therefore was the second notable success of my Fair Banking Campaign.
Some 10 years or so after my "Getting back the Charges" article was published a number of people, entirely independently and in different parts of the Country, followed my lead and successfully litigated to reclaim their own bank charges by arguing many of the points which I had made, unbeknown to them, all those years earlier (which had also by then been bolstered by the "Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations").
Amongst these people were Bob Egerton, who went on to set up bankbuster.co.uk, and Stephen Hone, who went on to set up penaltycharges.co.uk. These people then went on to publicise their successes with great effect with the help of the internet, which had been fairly limited in it's use in 1994, and were joined in doing so by the Consumer Action Group and the media attention which followed led to a deluge of such claims being made against the banks costing them many millions of pounds in refunded charges.
In the circumstances I commend all of the people involved for the fantastic work that they have done in the same spirit as the Fair Banking Campaign which I myself started all those years ago.
Best wishes,