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I apologise for a long first post, but please bear with me while I summarise some painstaking research I have done on the Information Commissioners Office and its secret negotiations with Credit Reference Agencies and Utility Companies to unlawfully allow credit defaults to be entered on non-credit agreements.
BACKGROUND: In December 2012 I settled an invoice from Southern Water. Three months later I received a notice threatening a credit default from SW despite having a receipt, a reference number and a bank statement confirming payment received by them in full, three months earlier. I phoned Southern Water repeatedly to no avail. Just days before the default was threatened to be entered, in desperation I wrote to Southern Water's CEO threatening them with a criminal action for harrassment and claiming damages. Only at this point did they contact me and apologise for the "mistake".
Eventually I contacted the head of consumer affairs at SW and had a long exchange of emails. This man appeared not to have any knowledge of the law and referred me to his company lawyer. I talked at length to this lawyer who confirmed that permission to enter a credit default for bills that had no express credit agreement attached to them was requested in a series of meetings between the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and Experian and other CRAs and several Utility Companies. The lawyer told me that he registered his disquiet at these meetings that credit defaults entered on Utility Bills might be subject to challenge on several grounds that I had suggested, and he agreed with these misgivings: 1. Utility bills are invoices for services provided in advance and paid for in arrears, exactly like a garage servicing a car, or a newsagent delivering papers and billing a week or month later. None of these kinds of transactions are credit agreements, even though they have a credit element within them. 2. For a credit default to be entered a SPECIFIC and EXPRESS agreement must first be entered into and signed in full knowledge by both parties. 3. Such agreements are regulated by the Consumer Credit Act. A mobile phone bill IS generally a credit agreement because it is signed by the parties and understood to be so. An application for a utility such as gas or water is NOT a credit agreement and you will see that such applications do not declare themselves as such.
I wrote to the ICO and asked them why they had given permission to CRAs and Utility companies to enter credit defaults on Utility bills when both the latter already had cheap and efficient ways of pursuing debt by means of the county court, for which bulk summonses can be obtained and processed at a very small cost, and arguably cheaper than entering a default with a CRA. I also asked them to explain the legality of their decision and quoted their own guidelines on credit defaults which mentioned repeatedly and exclusively "lenders" and "borrowers". Nowhere in their remit or guidelines did they declare or claim they had the power to allow defaults other than for specific, signed credit agreements. I also asked them to explain how their rules somehow resulted in me being threatened falsely with a default.
There followed an immense amount of correspondence and several FOI requests which sought information about the ICO's meetings and who attended them. To this day, after several months, the ICO has rejected all but one of my FOI requests on various and spurious grounds, including not being in the public interest and therefore claiming anonymity for the CRA and Utility company executives, a claim that my requests were too expensive to follow up, another reply stating that the information was not available, another response saying my complaint that their replies had not been adequate was rejected. Except for a few heavily redacted "minutes" that in fact were not minutes at all, they have refused to give one single piece of useful or salient information. I then asked them to take up a formal complaint against Southern Water which so far they have failed to do. In addition, at every point during my correspondence the ICO was obstructive, devious, delayed answers until the absolute end of their statutory time limit and then each successive letter was met with a requirement that I opened a "new" case with another delay of 20 days before I got a response, which again rejected my request and asked me yet again to try another request with yet another 20 day delay until their reply.
This outrageous game playing clearly has one purpose: The very public body who regulates other bodies on freedom of information is itself blocking access to the same thing.
Undaunted I tried other exhausting avenues of research. I have discovered that between approximately 2007 and 2011 the Information Commissioner had what were tantamount to secret talks with Reference Agencies and they were bulldozed into acquiescence over permission for CRAs to enter unlawful defaults. I know the meetings were likely to have been secret, and by that I mean that no consultation was offered to consumer groups or concerned members of the electorate, because among other information the minutes did not indentify anyone present who wasn't either a member of the ICO or the CRAs or Utility companies. A very brief outcome statement and policy change notice was published on an obscure part of the ICO website subsequent to these meetings and the go ahead was evidently allowed through with barely a whisper. This issue had been heard in private, passed without any legal reference and implemented with not a single consultation I am aware of with anyone but the three parties referred to.
In effect the ICO has invented the law as it goes along, without a shred of evidence that their decision has any legal basis whatsoever. Moreover, despite carefully describing my own situation, no-one at the ICO expressed any regret, empathy or understanding that I was on the cusp of having my credit rating ruined, and appears, so far, not to be interested in pursuing any complaint or action against Southern Water.
Regarding CRAs themselves, I think any intelligent and aware consumer should be very concerned at the UNILATERAL power of these agencies and their collusion with the ICO, the very body that is meant to be holding them to account on our behalf. Rather than regulate them properly, the ICO has revealed itself as a bed fellow of the CRAs. Increasingly, reference agencies are exploiting consumers in outrageous ways without any proper balances. They hold increasingly large amounts of data about you and I, and then use scare tactics in order to persuade you to stump up cash before they reveal that info. It is a fundamental conflict of interest to both gather and mine date on the one hand, then sell it on the basis of the paranoia they foster. The way they operate is not dissimilar to the following scenario:
A neighbour knocks on your door and tells you he has information that you are a thief, con artist and rapist. You ask him where he gained this alleged information. "Ah, well you'll have to pay me to find out". This is tantamount to defamation and extortion at the same time. It is essentially a circular con-trick, designed to snitch on you to others and then charge you to stop the snitching. The CRAs have immense power and that power, whether based on true information or not, can potentially ruin you financially.
A note about the difference between a credit default and a CCJ: It is a myth that a CCJ is worse. A county court action has a crucial quality lacking in a credit default. YOU CAN CHALLENGE a threatened CCJ in open court. This is due process. A credit default is NOT due process. It is a unilateral act that cannot be overturned in open court, and cannot be challenged except by virtue of rules which the CRAs set themselves, and their decision is usually final without running through hoops. A credit default, unless stubbornly challenged and overturned, remains on your file for six years and is certain to drastically reduce your rating whether it is true or not.
I am not by any means suggesting that legitimate defaults should not be entered and I am not advocating a debtor's charter. I would urge anyone in a similar position or who is concerned about this subject to email or write to the ICO and challenge their policy on defaults, open a FOI request (it is free) on the same subject and also demand evidence that they have any power at all to make the law up as they wish. Thanks for your patience in reading this and I would welcome any views or similar experiences. Thank you.
BACKGROUND: In December 2012 I settled an invoice from Southern Water. Three months later I received a notice threatening a credit default from SW despite having a receipt, a reference number and a bank statement confirming payment received by them in full, three months earlier. I phoned Southern Water repeatedly to no avail. Just days before the default was threatened to be entered, in desperation I wrote to Southern Water's CEO threatening them with a criminal action for harrassment and claiming damages. Only at this point did they contact me and apologise for the "mistake".
Eventually I contacted the head of consumer affairs at SW and had a long exchange of emails. This man appeared not to have any knowledge of the law and referred me to his company lawyer. I talked at length to this lawyer who confirmed that permission to enter a credit default for bills that had no express credit agreement attached to them was requested in a series of meetings between the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and Experian and other CRAs and several Utility Companies. The lawyer told me that he registered his disquiet at these meetings that credit defaults entered on Utility Bills might be subject to challenge on several grounds that I had suggested, and he agreed with these misgivings: 1. Utility bills are invoices for services provided in advance and paid for in arrears, exactly like a garage servicing a car, or a newsagent delivering papers and billing a week or month later. None of these kinds of transactions are credit agreements, even though they have a credit element within them. 2. For a credit default to be entered a SPECIFIC and EXPRESS agreement must first be entered into and signed in full knowledge by both parties. 3. Such agreements are regulated by the Consumer Credit Act. A mobile phone bill IS generally a credit agreement because it is signed by the parties and understood to be so. An application for a utility such as gas or water is NOT a credit agreement and you will see that such applications do not declare themselves as such.
I wrote to the ICO and asked them why they had given permission to CRAs and Utility companies to enter credit defaults on Utility bills when both the latter already had cheap and efficient ways of pursuing debt by means of the county court, for which bulk summonses can be obtained and processed at a very small cost, and arguably cheaper than entering a default with a CRA. I also asked them to explain the legality of their decision and quoted their own guidelines on credit defaults which mentioned repeatedly and exclusively "lenders" and "borrowers". Nowhere in their remit or guidelines did they declare or claim they had the power to allow defaults other than for specific, signed credit agreements. I also asked them to explain how their rules somehow resulted in me being threatened falsely with a default.
There followed an immense amount of correspondence and several FOI requests which sought information about the ICO's meetings and who attended them. To this day, after several months, the ICO has rejected all but one of my FOI requests on various and spurious grounds, including not being in the public interest and therefore claiming anonymity for the CRA and Utility company executives, a claim that my requests were too expensive to follow up, another reply stating that the information was not available, another response saying my complaint that their replies had not been adequate was rejected. Except for a few heavily redacted "minutes" that in fact were not minutes at all, they have refused to give one single piece of useful or salient information. I then asked them to take up a formal complaint against Southern Water which so far they have failed to do. In addition, at every point during my correspondence the ICO was obstructive, devious, delayed answers until the absolute end of their statutory time limit and then each successive letter was met with a requirement that I opened a "new" case with another delay of 20 days before I got a response, which again rejected my request and asked me yet again to try another request with yet another 20 day delay until their reply.
This outrageous game playing clearly has one purpose: The very public body who regulates other bodies on freedom of information is itself blocking access to the same thing.
Undaunted I tried other exhausting avenues of research. I have discovered that between approximately 2007 and 2011 the Information Commissioner had what were tantamount to secret talks with Reference Agencies and they were bulldozed into acquiescence over permission for CRAs to enter unlawful defaults. I know the meetings were likely to have been secret, and by that I mean that no consultation was offered to consumer groups or concerned members of the electorate, because among other information the minutes did not indentify anyone present who wasn't either a member of the ICO or the CRAs or Utility companies. A very brief outcome statement and policy change notice was published on an obscure part of the ICO website subsequent to these meetings and the go ahead was evidently allowed through with barely a whisper. This issue had been heard in private, passed without any legal reference and implemented with not a single consultation I am aware of with anyone but the three parties referred to.
In effect the ICO has invented the law as it goes along, without a shred of evidence that their decision has any legal basis whatsoever. Moreover, despite carefully describing my own situation, no-one at the ICO expressed any regret, empathy or understanding that I was on the cusp of having my credit rating ruined, and appears, so far, not to be interested in pursuing any complaint or action against Southern Water.
Regarding CRAs themselves, I think any intelligent and aware consumer should be very concerned at the UNILATERAL power of these agencies and their collusion with the ICO, the very body that is meant to be holding them to account on our behalf. Rather than regulate them properly, the ICO has revealed itself as a bed fellow of the CRAs. Increasingly, reference agencies are exploiting consumers in outrageous ways without any proper balances. They hold increasingly large amounts of data about you and I, and then use scare tactics in order to persuade you to stump up cash before they reveal that info. It is a fundamental conflict of interest to both gather and mine date on the one hand, then sell it on the basis of the paranoia they foster. The way they operate is not dissimilar to the following scenario:
A neighbour knocks on your door and tells you he has information that you are a thief, con artist and rapist. You ask him where he gained this alleged information. "Ah, well you'll have to pay me to find out". This is tantamount to defamation and extortion at the same time. It is essentially a circular con-trick, designed to snitch on you to others and then charge you to stop the snitching. The CRAs have immense power and that power, whether based on true information or not, can potentially ruin you financially.
A note about the difference between a credit default and a CCJ: It is a myth that a CCJ is worse. A county court action has a crucial quality lacking in a credit default. YOU CAN CHALLENGE a threatened CCJ in open court. This is due process. A credit default is NOT due process. It is a unilateral act that cannot be overturned in open court, and cannot be challenged except by virtue of rules which the CRAs set themselves, and their decision is usually final without running through hoops. A credit default, unless stubbornly challenged and overturned, remains on your file for six years and is certain to drastically reduce your rating whether it is true or not.
I am not by any means suggesting that legitimate defaults should not be entered and I am not advocating a debtor's charter. I would urge anyone in a similar position or who is concerned about this subject to email or write to the ICO and challenge their policy on defaults, open a FOI request (it is free) on the same subject and also demand evidence that they have any power at all to make the law up as they wish. Thanks for your patience in reading this and I would welcome any views or similar experiences. Thank you.
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