UPDATE: The Morses Scheme has failed. See Morses – what is happening to loans and refunds
UPDATE: in March 2022, Loans At Home went into administration. There is no money to pay any refunds. Any remaining loans have been written off and you should not make any payments to them.
UPDATE: The Provident Scheme has now closed and it is too late to make any Provident complaints.
Doorstep lending – also called home credit – is where a collector comes to your house to collect the repayments. Many people have been borrowing from the same lender for years.
If you had doorstep loans, you may be able to get a refund of the interest you paid if the lender should have realised the loan was unaffordable for you.
Contents
What is an “unaffordable” loan?
The regulator says that a loan is unaffordable if you couldn’t make the repayments without borrowing again. This could be borrowing from the same lender, from someone else, getting deeper into your overdraft or by not paying a bill.
So even if you always paid your loans on time, they could still have been unaffordable. Especially if you had several loans at the same time or often had to refinance/top-up a loan.
Often the first few loans may have been just about affordable, but the lender should have realised their loans were making your life more difficult when you kept getting more loans.
If you were struggling, your agent should have suggested that you could repay the current one a lot more slowly with no extra interest being added. But too often people were just offered another larger loan.
That was irresponsible lending and you should get a refund back of the interest you paid.
You are very unlikely to get a refund for only one loan. But if you borrowed several times and if you took out a new loan when you were having problems paying an existing one, then complain.
How to ask for a refund from home credit lenders
Here is a template letter you can use. Change it so it tells what happened to you.
Template letter for doorstep loan refunds
I want you to send me a list of them, showing for each loan when it was taken out, how much interest and charges you added and what I repaid. I would like you to send me a complete list even if you consider that some of the loans are too old to be refunded. [delete this if you have all your loan details.]
You should never have given me these unaffordable loans. I am asking you to refund the interest and any charges I paid, plus statutory interest, and to delete any negative information from my credit record.
[If any of the following happened to you, add a couple of sentences describing this. If the problems didn’t happen for all of your loans, add the words OFTEN or SOMETIMES. Delete any that didn’t happen to you.]
- I have borrowed from you continuously for [say how many years]. Every time I repaid a few payments my collector encouraged me to take a top up and refinance it. My collector never explained I would have paid less interest if I just took a new loan and carried on repaying the old one.
- I missed several payments and the collector knew I was in difficulty as I had lost my job/had my hours cut/benefits reduced but I was just offered a new loan. I was never told that I could have a repayment plan for my existing loan instead.
- When I asked my collector if I could pay over a longer period, he/she said I couldn’t unless I took a new loan.
- For the first loan my collector looked at my payslip but after that he never checked and never asked if I was getting the same money – I wasn’t.
- My collector said I needed to change some things on my application otherwise it wouldn’t be approved.
- My collector filled out the application and gave it to me to sign, I didn’t have time to read it.
I didn’t know that the lender was supposed to check that I could repay the loan without having to borrow more. I only found out in [say when and how you heard about these refunds – article in the Sun? Facebook advert? friend told you?]
Also include your customer reference number if you had one. And explain if you have moved address or changed your email so they can locate your account.
Contact details for doorstep lenders
- Cockle email enquiries@cocklefinance.co.uk with Affordability Complaint as the title
- Compton Finance email mark.phillips@comptonfinance.co.uk with Affordability Complaint as the title
- GR Finance email grfinanceltd@gmail.com with Affordability Complaint as the title
- Mutual email to complaints@mutual.uk.com.
- Naylors Finance email with Complaint in the title to admin@jrnaylors.com.
- Pinewood Finance C0 email tracy.evans@pinewood-finance.co.uk with Affordability Complaint as the title
- Short Term Finance (Birmingham) Use their online form and copy your complaints letter into there: complaints to Short-Term Finance.
- Skyline Direct complaints@skylinedirect.com
- Swift ivan@swiftdl.co.uk
- Valleys Finance admin@valleysfinance.ltd.uk with Affordability Complaint as the title
Keep a copy of online complaints or letter sent – if you email it to yourself it’s easy to pass on to the Ombudsman if needed.
You should get a response in 8 weeks
You may get a list of your loans on its own. This is NOT the response to your complaint, which will arrive later. You don’t need to do anything with the list of loans, just keep it. If the lender makes you an offer, it will help you to see how good or bad it is.
The lender should reply to your complaint within 8 weeks from when you send the email, not when they acknowledge it.
Lenders may be very slow about replying to complaints and they often don’t make a good offer. They may ask for two more weeks several times… I suggest you send the case to the Ombudsman straight away after 8 weeks.
How strong is your complaint?
Very large numbers of these complaints are being won at the Ombudsman – in the last quarter of 2020, 84% of doorstep lending complaints were won by the borrower.
In all of those Ombudsman cases, the lender had either rejected the complaint or made a poor offer.
So don’t be put off if this happens to you, send it to the Ombudsman!.
Three useful guidelines are:
- The more loans you had, the better your case. Borrowing for long periods by taking out new loans or refinancing existing ones shows you were dependent on the loans.
- It can be hard to win a complaint for just a couple of small loans.
- It’s normal to not get the first few loans refunded. If a lender has offered you a refund on loans 5-12 that is probably a good offer. But if they have offered a refund on just loans 10-12 it probably isn’t.
- The larger the loans became, the better your complaint is.
- The Ombudsman will usually look at loans that are over 6 years old, but many lenders just refuse. You can go back to 2007.
Sending a complaint to the Ombudsman
The easiest way to send a complaint is to use their online application form because that asks all the questions they need to know the answer to (most of these are easy, such as would you like to be contacted by letter, email or phone?).
You probably won’t get a refund back of all the interest you paid… but ask for a refund on all loans and let the Ombudsman make the decision about where your loans became unaffordable.
You don’t have to calculate anything or ask for a specific amount. If you don’t yet have a list of your loans, say you have asked for one but the lender hasn’t sent it.
What should you say to FOS?
There isn’t a separate template for this. You can just copy the complaint you sent to the lender. But here are some more things you may want to add.
- Say if you had a poor credit record, especially if it got worse as you carried on borrowing from the doorstep lender.
- Say if you repaid some loans early because you refinanced your loan. Here you may have paid more in interest than if you had just been given an extra loan. If this wasn’t explained to you by your agent (and I bet it wasn’t!) then you paid more interest than you should have.
- Also tell the Ombudsman if it was always your agent suggesting you borrow more, perhaps because it was getting near to Christmas, or in August when you might need more money for new school uniforms, or because you had paid off a lot of a previous loan.
A lender in your house should only offer a loan if you had asked them in writing for it. So if this happened to you, mention it in your complaint to the Ombudsman.
Send your bank statements and credit report
Send your bank statements with your complaint. If you haven’t got them all, send ones you do have and set about asking your bank for the rest, then send those. You are more likely to win a complaint if you send them, especially if you only had a few loans.
If you have borrowed for many years and the pile of statements would be HUGE, it’s still a good idea to get them all now, but you could then wait and see what the ombudsman asks for.
Don’t worry if your bank statements show a lot of gambling. The Ombudsman just accepts you have a gambling problem, you can still win these complaints.
Also get a copy of your free TransUnion Statutory Credit report and send it to the Ombudsman with your complaint. Don’t worry that you can’t get an old credit report – the Ombudsman knows this isn’t possible.
Do you have a current loan?
You can complain when you are still repaying a loan. If you tell the lender you want a payment arrangement, they should allow you to pay less each week over a longer period without adding any more interest.
But if you have other problem debts as well, talk to StepChange and they can see if a debt management plan would help.
You can also still complain if you are in a debt management plan. But don’t bother if you are in an IVA, bankruptcy or a DRo.
Need some help?
Your local Citizens Advice can help with these complaints.
You don’t need a lawyer or a claims company. They take a LOT of your refund and you can make a better claim on your own than they can. A good claim involves telling your own story, you know what happened and a claims company doesn’t!
Comments or questions?
Hundreds of readers have posted comments below about how their complaints are going and the successes they have had. If you have a question, ask it here!
Are you struggling to pay car finance?
Is your credit limit too high? Not affordable?
Can you get an overdraft refund?
Marie says
Hi Sara, I have accepted my offer from Morses even though I think it should have been a lot more. I accepted in case they went for the scheme whilst my complaint was with the ombudsman.
My question is, when the scheme begins, will I be eligible to apply through that also and maybe get more back?
Sara (Debt Camel) says
Probably – but it will depend on the Scheme rules. This has been possible in the 3 Schemes there have been so far.
Christina Wynne says
Hi Sara I have just used your template letter to loans at home. I just wanted to ask now that they are in administration is it still just an 8 week wait for a response or will it be months until the administrators have made a decision?
Sara (Debt Camel) says
it will be many months probably.
Christina Wynne says
Thank you for replying x
Margaret says
I have had 17 loans with provident can I get what they owed me back
Sara (Debt Camel) says
Did you make a claim to their Scheme?
Christina Wynne says
Hi Sara. I had put in a redress claim with loans at home after they went into administration. Today I received an email from them and in the email they have said this.
As is explained in the report, it is anticipated that there will won’t be any payment made to unsecured creditors (which includes customers with a successful affordability complaint).
If the Joint Administrators are able to make a payment to unsecured creditors we will contact you and ask if you wish to make a claim. You do not need to take any action at this stage. Further updates will be posted to the website when available.
Does this mean they are going to do a scheme like provident did?
Sara (Debt Camel) says
do you still owe them any money?
Christina Wynne says
No. I cleared my payments before the administration
Sara (Debt Camel) says
Then I am afarid there is little to do. They are not going for a Scheme like Provident – they are insolvent and they are warning you there may be no money to distribute to people who have affordability complaints.
Christina Wynne says
Ok. Thanks Sara
Sherri says
Hi sara, I have the same email but I do still owe them money. What would your advice be please.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
how many previous loans did you have from them?
How large is this current loan and how much have you paid to it so far?
Are you still making payments?
Sherri says
Hi thanks for the reply. It was a loan for £1650 with interest of £1438.80 so total of £3088.80 I have paid £1629.20 so I have an outstanding balance of £1459.60 left. I’m still makeing payments of £20 a week at the moment. I have had 4 previous loans this is my 5th.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
if the 5 loans were nearly consecutive (no breaks of several months between them) then this last loan is may well to be decided to be unaffordable.
Are the £20 a week payments affordable, or will they leave you so short of money that you have to borrow more elsewhere ego catalogues etc or get behind with bills.
Have you actually made a complaint yet? Your aim at the moment is not to pay any more, so that if you win your complaint the balance is written off even if there is no money to pay out refunds.
Sherri says
The loans were definitely consecutive I had 3 at once at one point. I have made the complaint in may. The £20 a week isn’t affordable no.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
Then stopping paying may be your best option. Tell them the payments are unaffordable and you want them to decide your claim as you believe that will clear your balance.
this will harm your credit record, but if you win the complaint the negative mark will be removed. This is better than paying them, risking not getting those payments back (in some administration you will get back the amount you have paid since the administration started but this may not happen if there are no payouts to make), and getting into more debt elsewhere. Could you use some of that freed up £20 a week to clear other debts or arrears on bills?
If you are worried about stopping paying them, talk to a debt adviser such as National Debtline on 0808 808 4000.
Sherri says
Thanks so much for the advice I will email them today and tell them the payments are unaffordable and I want a decision.
Thomas says
Hi Sara,
I have had 18 loans with Morses Club and want to make an unaffordable complaint against them all. Do I need to state loan 1 – date-amount for each one.
Loan 2-date -amount…
Many Thanks.
Thomas.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
No – they know all that. Just send in a complaint and in the complaint ask for full details of the loans.
Christina Wynne says
Has anyone else received an email from morses regarding the scheme of arrangement? There is also a link to sign up to a scheme portal.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
See my new article on this: https://debtcamel.co.uk/morses-proposed-scheme-implications/
Alexander says
Hi Sara. I sent a complaint letter to Morses in July 2022. Will this go into the scheme as I sent the complaint letter before the Aug 22 cut off. Or will it be processed as normal.
Sara (Debt Camel) says
See https://debtcamel.co.uk/morses-proposed-scheme-implications/. But if you have not had a reply to this, you need to contact them urgently and ask why not.
Rachael Hall says
Hello
I’ve had a couple of loans from loans at home back in 2020, I made the first repayment on both loans but as it was with a doorstep agent and i never saw or heard from the agent again found it difficult to repay anymore, i do still owe them money, but I hadnt heard from the company since the first amounts of each loan where paid, that was until yestarday, ive had an email from a debt collection agency about these amounts.
I’ve since heard that the loan company have gone into administration so I was just wondering if I’d be able to get the debt wipe due to not hearing from them and the unaffordability of it..
Sara (Debt Camel) says
You can make an affordability complaint to the administrators.
What is the rest of your financial situation like? any more problem loans?