High Street bank Alliance & Leicester (A&L) has backed down on an issue concerning one of its customers and the overdraft fees that it has levied on their UK current account.
It seems to have acknowledged that £4.50 is a fair price for bouncing a cheque, rather than the advertised fee of £25. This is the amount the […]

More than £1bn a day was borrowed by homeowners in March, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).
A big increase in remortgaging ahead of an expected rise in interest rates, coupled with the ever-increasing cost of property, pushed up borrowing by 22% in comparison with February.
A total of £31.3bn was borrowed against homes during […]

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has come under withering fire from nine leading economists as inflation threatens to spiral out of control and wreck the Chancellor’s vision of a stable economy.
In an open letter, the nine economists condemned the MPC for failing to halt the surge in inflation and endangering the mortgages […]

The Government has conceded that there were an extra 100,000 adults living in both relative and absolute poverty in the UK in 2005/06.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has revised its poverty statistics, originally published in March. It now reckons there were 7.2 million adults in relative poverty that year and 5 million working age […]

Millions of pounds have been siphoned from motorists’ accounts as an international crime gang has hacked into them and stolen amounts ranging from £20 to thousands of pounds.
Police believe that the cards are ’skimmed’ at petrol stations, where the card number and PIN are identified, giving the criminals access to the accounts.
About 200 of the […]

The Co-operative Bank has launched a credit card which gives money to Shelter, the charity for the homeless.
When customers first use the card, the bank will donate £20 to the charity to be used towards funding the cost of projects for the homeless or people in need of housing.
Shelter predicted that 2,000 people would take out the […]

Every single town in the UK now has an average house price of £100,000 for the first time in the country’s history, according to Halifax.
The cheapest town is Lochgelly in Fife, where the average property costs £104,738.
The average for the country as a whole passed £200,000 for the first time in February this year, with […]

Energy regulator Ofgem has urged customers of EDF Energy and Scottish Power to switch to new suppliers for cheaper power.
Ofgem says that customers can save up to £140 a year if they make the switch because these companies have failed to pass on wholesale cuts in the cost of energy to their customers, whereas some of […]