Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

[Lucky7even]

I was given a Halifax Credit Card in 2006.

When I got a copy of the agreement through, my signature appears, yet the lender has failed to sign it.

They knew I was unemployed/retired, and on benefits when they lent to me.

They originally set my credit limit to £1000.

Over the years, the kept increasing the limit each time it now stand around £9K.

I have £3K debt on it.

In 2011, Halifax gave me further credit by giving me a personal loan done online through the current account.

They failed to ask me about my income, what my employment status was, and affordability.

I am now on an IVA thanks to Halifax keep giving me credit when they knew I coudlnt afford to pay it back.

Do I have a claim for irresponsible lending, and where do I go from here.

Many thanks

[teaboy2]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

To be honest, i doubt you have a claim as their response would simply be that you knew what amount of spending you could afford and you were not obligated to buy things or use the credit on the card they gave you. So they would likely argue you were irresponsible in managing your own finances when it came to using your credit card for purchases.

As for the loan, well we need more info as to what the loan was for, if it was to pay off the credit card then we are simply back to the above arguement, and your chance off a successful claim is very low if not zero.

I know its not the answer you were looking for, but any other answer would mean anyone in debt would be able to make a successful claim under irresponsible lending, when truth is they cannot.

Though i do have one question, when they gave you the card did you have a good credit rating or a poor one? If poor rating, then you may have a shot on grounds they did not take into account your inability to repay other debts at the time they gave you the card, which would have been demonstrated by your poor credit rating if they had checked your credit file prior to giving you the card.

[wales01man]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

As some of us know in the past it was too easy to borrow its not irresponsible lending more irresponsible borrowing the OP like the rest of us who borrowed and got into too much debt more than we can repay

[leclerc]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

I was given a Halifax Credit Card in 2006.

When I got a copy of the agreement through, my signature appears, yet the lender has failed to sign it.

They knew I was unemployed/retired, and on benefits when they lent to me.

They originally set my credit limit to £1000.

Over the years, the kept increasing the limit each time it now stand around £9K.

I have £3K debt on it.

In 2011, Halifax gave me further credit by giving me a personal loan done online through the current account.

They failed to ask me about my income, what my employment status was, and affordability.

I am now on an IVA thanks to Halifax keep giving me credit when they knew I coudlnt afford to pay it back.

Do I have a claim for irresponsible lending, and where do I go from here.

Many thanks

Was your sole account in your name only or was it a joint account?
With regards to applying for a loan online then clearly your credit rating remained fairly good and that you were not spending all the benefits you were receiving ie that there was an excess of money.

I agree with Teaboy2 on the argument of irresponsible lending because whether Halifax gave you credit or not, you ultimately used it and benefitted from it by spending it.

[FlamingParrot]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

Something similar happened to me also in 2006, when the A&L insisted I should have a 'financial review' at one of their branches. I wasn't at all keen on such an idea and kept making excuses, but they insisted and arranged a lunchtime appointment at a branch that was just 2 minuts away from my place of work at the time. I had a current account, a cash ISA dating back to 2000 and a savings account, as well as a credit card. Now if there had been an award for being cr@p at personal finance, I would have received quite a few by then, so I kept using my A&L branded CC (owned by MBNA apparently since 2002 but still showing up on A&L's systems) while having a few grand in the savings and cash ISA accounts, and keeping my current account mostly overdrawn! (Don't ask!)

The advisor went through my accounts and brought up the CC and asked me if I had other cards. I said I did. He then said "you are paying xx% APR on your cards, what do you think would be best for you to do?" Despite my lack of personal finance skills, I replied "maybe I should use my savings to pay towards the cards". His reply was that I should get a 'consolidation loan' for £5k, at an APR of just over 6%, where I'd pay just over £100 a month. He printed off a long credit agreement, asked me to sign it, and said the money would be in my current account the next day! I was just working as a temp on a month-by-month basis at the time.

Ironically he also said I should transfer the old cash ISA to a Premiere or Premium one, but I'd need to provide 2 forms of ID, such as a Counciil Tax bill AND a recent utility bill! I first opened the current account in the early 90s, it's not like I was a new customer. They'd been sending me statements for 15 years yet they said their own statements were not acceptable. This was just for the cash ISA which was my OWN MONEY, the loan was approved on the spot without proof of anything and the money paid in the next day, while I had to go back 3 times to sort out the ISA! :mad2: :mad2:

This being me, I only paid off around £1k to the Ikea storecard which had an APR of 29%, another £1k was swallowed by the O/D and the remaining £3k just vanished into thin air. My debt increased by £3k and I had to keep paying it for 5 years, I couldn't default on it due to RoSo, but I stopped paying my CCs in Jan 2010 and went down the unenforceability route. Irresponsible lending? Maybe, but that's what all banks were doing and most customers were going for.

The key to the whole thing is with the bonus system. Financial insititutions pay annual 'performance-related' bonuses to their staff, based on the figures for the previous year. If you are in charges of loans, mortgages, credit cards, etc., obviously the more the merrier. By the time things go sour and people default, there's no going back and many bankers would have moved on, it's not uncommon to change jobs right after bonus time.

[leclerc]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

It was not annual at the time FP, and if it was with PPI then it was most definitely target related. A Loan was much high benefit to the branch than a mere credit card but I am surprised that they did not sell you life insurance and a packaged account or even recommend a financial advisor ie investments....that would have been the grand slam

[wales01man]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

I have to point out that if someone is trying to sell you something beit a financial product or anything you can say NO we all know about the small print but for some reason we tend to ignore it,
as far as i can remember with anything sold through a bank or a broker there comes a warning about taking further advice

[Eloise01]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

I have to point out that if someone is trying to sell you something beit a financial product or anything you can say NO we all know about the small print but for some reason we tend to ignore it,
as far as i can remember with anything sold through a bank or a broker there comes a warning about taking further advice

Albeit there are lots of these sorts of "scams" around, I do agree. It's perhaps a lawyers distrusting soul, but I always read the entire of the small print, intensely annoying everyone! I therefore have no misrepresented PPI's to reclaim because I never had any. I have no worthless product guarantees. Etc. Etc. Sometimes, reading these threads, I fell I have somehow missed out on life! Although I did once spend an enjoyable afternnon annoying the hell out of a timeshare rep., who having spent many hours feting me and hubby at some expense, was most annoyed when I not only insisted on reading the small print, but also said that I would like to review and, if I considered it acceptable, sign it in England. Apparently legal documents can't be signed in England. Yeah, sure - because then they would be covered by UK law. Unfortunately, I wouldn't have signed it in any country - and I knew that before I read the small print, because I had no intention of ever buying a timeshare.... But anyone who did sign would have regretted it because it definitely didn't say what they said it said!

[wales01man]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

Eloise
I think you summed it up well even if most of us laymen read the small print we would still in many cases be non the wiser from experience i know that very well.
In my case when we were buying a house in the contract with the housing association a clause read by me seem to say we were responsible for fencing of some land not included in the sale phoning the HA they said it was correct we consulted a solicitor who read the contract and pointed out the HA were responsible and told us the wording that confirmed that when we told the HA that they adnitted it was true we were not liable £42 the best money we ever spent

[Eloise01]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

Eloise
I think you summed it up well even if most of us laymen read the small print we would still in many cases be non the wiser from experience i know that very well.
In my case when we were buying a house in the contract with the housing association a clause read by me seem to say we were responsible for fencing of some land not included in the sale phoning the HA they said it was correct we consulted a solicitor who read the contract and pointed out the HA were responsible and told us the wording that confirmed that when we told the HA that they adnitted it was true we were not liable £42 the best money we ever spent

Very true. But on the other hand, on the case in point, I am not sure that "if you borrow money the lender expects you to pay it back" is small print - more like kind of obvious large print! I know that peoples circumstances can change making manageable debt unmanageable, but in this case the OP knew their circumstances all along and nothing changed. So it's more a case of irresponsible spending than irresponsible lending.

[Captain Haddock]

Re: Halifax- Irresponsible Lending?

BoS used to be ok but when they got taken over by the Halifax that, for me, was when the bother started. Irrisponsible lending? WIthout a shadow of a doubt; HBoS was one of the worst! The increases - unrequested - in credit card limits was clearly not studied enough to see if the borrower could actually afford the interest and I reckon this was a deliberate tactic, sanctioned by HBoS retail, to accrue as much income as possible and to hell with the mess the creditor was eventually left in. But it takes two to tango and we must accept some responsibility if we took on that extra credit. All my cards were not maxxed out due to spending but, rather, when hardship hit, the interest eventually drove them to those limits. And that's when the hounding started/

Fortunately, through fora such as this, I learned how to use the law against them and give them a kick in the teeth, a kicking that was the precursor to the massive public and fiscal beating the whole of that bent industry took from 2010 onwards.