help please , county court claim/ shop direct/ lowells

[sitting duck]

hi i bought a camera from littlewoods about 5/6 years i kept up to date with payements for a few years without checking exactly how much of the price which i think was around £250 i had paid back, anyway after about 3 or 4 years of monthly payements i thought i must have paid it all off, so after ringing littlewoods i found out i had paid off over £1000 :tinysmile_cry_t:, at this point i stopped paying them as i had paid around £800 of late payement charges! over the years i have had several threatening letters from lowells hamptons and one or two others but as i believe these charges are illegal/not legally enforceable i ignored them.
however i have recieved a county court claim form demanding payement of £250 oustanding but as this is made entirely of late payement charges i will of course be refute this, am i right in assuming these charges are not enforceable ? many thanks in advance.

[des8]

Re: help please , county court claim/ shop direct/ lowells

Late payment charges are enforceable, but they must be proportionate to any costs incurred by the catalogue company. I believe they would find it difficult to justify a £12 charge, when as far as I know they only send a pro forma letter about the charge when they send the next monthly account.

A contractual term that requires a person in breach, such as a late paying customer, to pay a predetermined sum is a penalty clause, unless that sum genuinely relates to the amount of damage caused by the breach.
This was established in 1915 after the fledgling Ford Motor Company required dealers to pay £250 should they sell its cars at less than the list price.
When Ford attempted to recover this sum from a garage that had done that, the Court of Appeal decided the sum was arbitrary, bore no relation to the loss and did not need to be paid.
As you intend to defend this you could at the same time counter claim for any late payment charges you may have already made:tinysmile_grin_t:

[sitting duck]

Re: help please , county court claim/ shop direct/ lowells

many thanks, off to get my £800 back off littlewoods now