We served a subject access rights letter on abbey national,received a copy of our motgage application and a barely legible copy of all the payments made.What do we do now?

-- beryl smith (beryl@lincs.screaming.net), November 03, 2000

Answers

Hi Beryl,

I assume that you are a victim of repossession and subsequent shortfall claim by the Abbey National and that was the reason that you served a Subject Access Rights Request on the Abbey National. Am I correct?

If I am I correct, then in my belief this is a very strange response from the Abbey National to your Subject Access Rights Request. The Abbey National are required under law to supply you with ANY details held by them, on you as the data subject, within 40 days of the receipt of the required fee (10 pounds is the maximum fee they are legally permitted to charge) and the SAR request.

If you read previous postings on this forum regarding Subject Access Rights Requests you will observe the experiences mortgage shortfall victims have endured when trying to exercise their rights given to them by parliament. The Data Protection Act gives us rights that we must not allow to be eroded!

If therefore you believe that you have not been provided with all the information that by the law the Abbey National are required to supply you with then you should write a formal complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner.

After you sent the required legal Subject Access Rights Request the Abbey National may have sent you some sort of form by return. If after reading the various postings on this forum regarding DPA requests and "tick the box forms" etc., you mayn believe that you were deceived into limiting your own rights given to you under the Data Protection Act. If this is the case then you may consider that you should include this fact in your complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner.

In my belief from the evidence of postings on this forum and from private correspondence I have received, it is quite possible, with the increasing number of complaints the Data Protection Commissioner must be receiving regarding violation of rights under the Act, that she must take action soon.

Regards,

-- Tony Hayter (Tony@Hayter.com), November 03, 2000.

Beryl, what is the name of the individual who dealt with your SAR at Abbey National? The material will have been sent to you along with a letter signed by a named individual from their Data Protection office. It certainly seems an odd batch of material to receive. As this is a shortfall case, they should have sent you a print out of their electronic 'log' which documents the handling of your case. The barely legible copies of payments made will probably have been printed off from a fiche, hence the poor quality. But Abbey have told at least one other repossessee that they do not have to supply these under the Act. So I'm wondering whether different Data Protection managers at Abbey are supplying different things - otherwise it's hard to make any sense of your experience. You certainly *must* write to the Data Protection Commissioner, Elizabeth France, at: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF. Ask for an Assessment. If Abbey have breached your rights, both you and she need to know about this, and you need to able to point this out (and point out the distress they have caused you) in any future dealings. Please let us know how things develop. There are lots of people who use this Q&A board who may be able to offer support. Facing a shortfall claim is bad enough without the lender being, apparently, unhelpful about supplying documentation to which you are entitled.

-- Eleanor Scott (eleanor.scott@btinternet.com), November 04, 2000.

Just an update on my original letter,we gave them another chance to respond,have now been sent 162 pages!six pages deal with the handling of the repossession,six LINES!tell us what happened to the file then,and only covers Feb 95 to Apr 95.The only name we have as a contact is from Davis & co,with their ref AL/AN.[as featured under the Abbey Nat page.We will now be writing to the data protection officer.

-- beryl smith (beryl@lincs.screaming.net), November 14, 2000.

Hi Beryl,

Thanks for that information. Do you need addresses etc for the Data Protection Commissioner? (Some of us have already had to go down this road.) Would appreciate an update from you - good to share experiences and advice.

all best

-- Eleanor Scott (eleanor.scott@btinternet.com), November 25, 2000.

Hi Beryl,

Would appreciate an update on this. Happy to swap information with you, privately if necessary.

-- Eleanor Scott (eleanor.scott@btinternet.com), June 17, 2001.