RBS cut evil customer charges - well, a bit.
Are you one of those people hovering on the breadline, having found yourself being shafted on a regular basis by your bank’s disgusting and unlawful charges?
If you’re a customer of the government-controlled RBS/Nat West banking beast, there’s some good news – those obscene £30 penalty charges for paying an item from an overdrawn account have been slashed in half and are now a slightly-less-obscene-but still-pretty-nasty £15.
Better still, if you have a bounced cheque, you’ll only be charged £5, down from a massive and scarcely believable £38. As the OFT has previously deemed any charge less than £12 as not worthy of investigation, the £15 figure is still a kick in the teeth but it’s an improvement.
Nick Spooner of the campaign group Legal Beagles said: “This announcement [by RBS-Natwest] is highly significant. I would expect most of the other banks to follow suit quite quickly.” But Marc Gander, of the Consumer Action Group, wasn’t so generous, saying: "Apart from the £5 charge, I think that the others are still much too high."
All in all, it’s too little too late. Next month should see the House of Lords delivering a definitive ruling on the matter, with the refund floodgates set to open shortly afterwards. That is unless the banks refuse to back down and seek leave to appeal to the court of the moon king from Georges Melies’ pioneering 1902 science fiction film ‘Le Voyage Dans La Lune.’
You never know with these weasels.
By the way, if you’re planning to leave a comment pouring scorn on those people who are regularly hit by bank charges, criticising them for failing to keep their finances in order, you might like to shut the fuck up – you’re completely missing the point.
TOPICS: Banking
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