One of our readers sent us this question:

Hi, just came across this site, am from the UK and its really informative, unfortunately alot of the laws you state are, obviously, only applicable to the USA – therefore, do you have any letters or know of UK laws that state the same thing – about refusing to have any communication with credit card issuers? Your help would be great – thanks swinny

Thanks for your question Swinny. I’ve done some digging for you, and here’s what I uncovered:

The Administration of Justice Act 1970 gives you the following rights:

• Creditors cannot alarm, distress or humiliate you or your family members.
• They cannot falsely represent themselves or the debt you owe.

Additionally, the Office of Fair Trading enforces several guidelines that collection officers must follow:

• They cannot contact you too frequently, or at unreasonable times.
• They cannot ignore a dispute about whether or not you owe the money.
• They cannot pretend to be a legal or government body.
• They cannot discuss your debt with anyone but you unless you authorize them to.

I’m going to give you a quick series of links that will give you all the information you need to know about how protect yourself from harassing creditors in the UK:

The National Debtline Creditor Harassment Fact Sheet for England and Wales - This site outlines many of your rights where collections agencies are concerned. It even tells you which agencies to complain to when you are being harassed by creditors.

The Office of Fair Trading Debt Collection Guidelines – This is a PDF that clearly states what collections officers are not allowed to do.

An excellent (but long) You Tube audio on how to handle collection agencies in the UK.

And finally, go back to the National Debtline for a full list of sample letters to send to your creditors. This includes everything from asking them to write off your debt to asking them to freeze the interest rate on your account.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any information that supported a “cease and desist” practice (stop all communication) like we have here in the US. However, the links above should give you the power you need to deal with debt collectors and make the harassing behavior stop according to your rights under UK law.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 07:45 and is filed under Debt Reduction FAQ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.