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Consumer rights' campaigner Martin Lewis.
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Man who cost banks £1bn
Paul Taylor and Don Frame25/ 4/2008
MARTIN Lewis confesses that he left the High Court in London with "a skip in my step" after hearing the judgement in the great bank charges case.
It is two years since Lewis started agitating about bank charges in TV documentaries and then on his website, offering template letters and guiding consumers through the complaint process. Until then, we had regarded bank charges like the weather - grim but beyond our control.
Though Lewis credits some "clever and dedicated people" with first taking up the battle, it was he who put the issue firmly in the mainstream. Of the estimated £1bn in bank charges so far recouped by customers, Lewis believes around half went to people who used his website. If so, he has helped to put around £500m back into the bank accounts of ordinary customers.
"There are many more people who have not put claims in yet. We are already seeing the numbers of downloads of template letters shoot up," he says, clearly eager to continue battling the banks. "I did not realise at first how enormous this would be," the Withington-born and Didsbury raised campaigner says. "I remember when I presented the first ever TV programme about this, Tonight With Trevor McDonald, in August 2006, and did the first interview about it on GMTV and wrote the first newspaper column," he says.
"Each time the feedback I got was immense, but what was interesting was that people were still not ready to do it. Once we started to get larger numbers of people who had got their money back, people started to know someone who had reclaimed, and that is when we reached critical mass. By February 2007, we were on 30,000 template letter downloads a day."
4.5m letters
To date, 4.5m letters have been downloaded. One person who followed Lewis's advice was mum of three Helen Franks from Prestwich, who took on the Royal Bank of Scotland when she was penalised for going into the red by just £27. Helen, who works for a dental recruitment company, says she was charged a total of £321 in fees in the weeks that followed, and when she went through her bank statements, she was shocked to find she had been charged more than £900 in interest over a six year period.
Despite winning her case at Manchester County Court, the bank ignored the ruling, and she says she had to threaten them with calling in the bailiffs before they repaid the full amount of her claim.
She says of the High Court decision: "It's absolutely fantastic news. Charging these sort of fees can cause immense problems to people who are already in tight financial situations."
Until the test case, consumers and banks had been indulging in a kind of shadow-boxing in which banks would settle out of court, and choose not to defend actions in the small claims court or complaints to the Financial Ombudsman.
"This is the first time we have had a proper binding decision," Lewis says. "That's why this is so important."
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25/04/2008 at 11:22