----< How much does a shortfall claim cost? >-------------------
About [sterling]67. Which is why lenders will happily send customers increasingly threatening letters for months or years after the customer has asked the lender to provide evidence of the validity its claims.

The low cost of running a shortfall claim - or a "project" - as some lenders call them, surprised us. We thought lenders would be budgeting them at about [sterling]25 a letter plus the cost of any legal advice they needed, even if that advice came from in-house, salaried lawyers.

We presume the low cost comes from the computerisation of much of the process - even of the skip tracing and investigative work that goes into assessing the customer's salary in order to decide whether to sue them or not.

We found out the cost by serving a second subject access rights notice on the Bradford & Bingley over a shortfall claim case. A "total cost" figure in one of the documents had changed as the chain of shortfall correspondence grew.

We've done our best to imitate the layout of the document. There's a link to it on the front page of the site and another in the repossession section.

----< MPs asked to reduce shortfall claim period to 6 years >---
The 6 year/12 year rule hit the headlines when National Association of Citizens Advice Bureax published a report claiming that mortgage lenders were pursuing shortfall claims against 250,000 people.

Lenders had delayed pursuing the claims for up to 10 years, NACAB said. The typical size of a claim is [sterling]27,000 and mortgage shortfall claims now make up a quarter of the CAB's workload.

NACAB called for the limitation period on mortgage shortfall claims to be reduced to six years by law.

We should add that there is some uncertainty over whether it is actually 12 years.

A lot of the press got their reporting of the numbers wrong: They claimed up to 250,000 homes were repossessed during the last recession. The exact numbers are unknown and depend on whether you define recession as the economic recession or as the housing recession. We think that figure is at least 50% too low.

For more details, visit NACAB's web-site at:
http://www.nacab.org.uk

You may have to register but registration is free.

----< CIFAS upsets the Data Protection Registrar >--------------
CIFAS - the Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System Ltd - has upset the Data Protection Registrar. The Data Protection Registrar said its support for the organisation has turned to concern because the number of public complaints about CIFAS have risen so much over the last year.

One of the DPR's concerns is the lack of public awareness about CIFAS - so it is a relief to know that public awareness is growing. The fact that the public is complaining about CIFAS suggests that the DPR got the measure of the public pulse when it criticised CIFAS for its bizarre practice of submitting "warnings" to credit reference agencies about people who live at the same address as anyone who CIFAS thinks once tried to commit a credit fraud.

We've covered on the web-site what CIFAS is and the problems its practices cause. We've also included links to its own explanation of those activities so we won't repeat it all here.

Now, a sad aspect of all this is that the Data Protection Registrar published its annual report - with its concerns about CIFAS - in June. So far as we know, this is the first publicity this aspect of its report has received.

You might wonder why we are mentioning this. Well, our sources among CIFAS's membership tell us that CIFAS has been spending a great deal of money on legal advice and correspondence with the Data Protection Registrar over the last few months. It has spent a great deal trying to put the DPR's mind at rest, we're told.

It has not, however, put our minds at rest.

For more details, visit the Home Repossession Page and take the link from the front page:
http://www.home-repo.org

To read the Data Protection Registrar's report, you'll need the Adobe Acrobat plug-in in your browser. It's free, easy to get and if you haven't got it, it installs itself pretty much automatically. The Data Protection Registrar's report is at:
http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/99arcontents.htm

Once it's downloaded, click on the binoculars and search for "CIFAS".

----< Changes to the site >-------------------------------------
We've added a new section called "Debt Industry". It is a revealing collection of links to companies that make money out of your debt.

Finally, at last, a page on Mortgage Indemnity Guarantees and the claims and counterclaims surrounding them. It's in the Repossession section.

We've updated the lender "mindset" page in the Repossession section to include evidence that Bradford & Bingley is routinely blanking out parts of its responses to Data Protection Act notices - even where the blanked information is not concerned with a current legal case.

The graphs in the Facts section have been updated and simplified. Note that Netscape Navigator does not properly support the HTML needed to read graphs properly.

We've added a few links to the various help links in the Who Helps? section.

[ends]

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