This should be the first thing you do after you recieve a shortfall claim.

Serving a Subject Access Rights Notice under your Data Protection Act rights is nothing to do with the rights to see documents that you get if the lender tries to take you to court. It's a separate right that you can use at any time to find out what data comapnies are storing about you. Your rights to see documents held by someone who is suing you are a different set of rights commonly known as "Discovery". This page talks only about how to serve a Subject Access Rights Notice.

You should serve a Subject Access Rights notice under the Data Protection Act because:

1. You need information with which to understand your position and determine how to proceed.
2. The results will nearly always show that the lender misadministered the repossession, the sale or the claim in some way. You can use this to improve your position.
3. Your lender will not offer much explanation of what it did with the security property. At best, it will offer a "completion statement" or "statement of account". These are unsatisfactory.
4. Should the case come to court, the courts will expect you to have done everything you can to find out what happened with regards the sale and to have reacted accordingly.

In our opinion, you should also serve SARs on each company associated with the claim, including the insurance companies, lawyers and "property management agents" that were linked to the claim. You can get the names of these from the information the lender sends back to you when you serve the SAR on it.

Many lenders send you a form asking for identity. This is perfectly reasonable. It's designed to stop people invading your privacy. They may also send you a form asking you to fill in boxes for the areas of information that you want. Do not tick these boxes. Instead, cross them out and write "All information held concerning me in all areas of your business".

Lenders such as Abbey National used to charge £10 for each "type" or "purpose" of information that they keep. The Data Protection Commissioner censured this practice in 2000. Now you should only have to pay £10 for all information a company holds on you.

We've put a copy of the sort of letter you should send in the Blacklisted section under the "Use the law" heading.

When you get the information back, go through every word of it and double-check the lender's calculations.

People who serve SARNs have found that lenders make an amazing array of mistakes. Click here to see one reader's findings after serving two SARNs on Abbey National.

Here's a quick list of some of those we've seen:

1. Lender says house was valued at £2000. Screengrab in second SARN response says it was valued at £6000
2. Lender says house was vandalised. Neighours say it wasn't, SARN response shows no sign of repairs, security fixes, etc
3. SARN response included an unsent letter that showed the lender told its lawyer not to show repossessee evidence of its claim (a breach of current Civil Procedure Rules)
4. SARN response accounts often at odds with lenders' debt collector's claims

You have the right to serve a SARN under the same as the letters you would send to credit reference agencies to ask for copies of your credit files. But a Subject Access Rights Notice is different to a Credit Reference Agency notice. It should let you see all the information a company holds on you. A Credit Reference Agency notice only shows information about your credit record.

You can, and should, serve a SARN on the credit reference agencies. At the time of writing, Experian is responding to SARNs correctly (and one of its staff has assured us that Experian does understand the differences in the notices. But as of March 2001, Equifax staff are still responding to SARNS as though they were £2 Credit Reference access notices. If this happens to you, write to the Information Commissioner requesting an assessment of Equifax. That should hurt Equifax badly. And Equifax... don't get on your high horse with us for reporting this. Get your staff trained instead!

You can also get more information about the Data Protection Act - and which companies are holding what sort of information from the Information Commission.

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Last modified: 12 Mar 2001
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