A lung cancer patient has gone to court to stop his bank contacting him about repayment of a loan after he was called 762 times in ten months.

David Lloyd, 61, and his partner, Annette Edwards, 57, owe the Halifax about £5,000. Because of Mr Lloyd’s illness, which is now in remission, they ran up an overdraft and got into arrears with their repayments.

The couple, from Manchester, claim that they were called 184 times in August last year and 169 times in September – an average of more than five calls a day.

When they changed their number the bank turned its attention to Ms Edwards’s daughter. She received between 60 and 100 calls on her mobile phone in four months.

Mr Lloyd said that pressure from the bank had harmed his recovery, made him less capable of working, gave him a phobia of telephones and left him with a stammer.

The couple started logging the calls from the Halifax after The Times reported how Alison Turner, a single mother from Plymouth, went to court to stop the Halifax from “bullying” her over debts last year. The case was settled out of court.

Mr Lloyd contacted Miss Turner’s Plymouth-based solicitor Neil Mercer, who is bringing an action under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. He said: “We never denied we owed the bank money but they called us four or five times a day, day after day.”

Mr Mercer, of Curtis Solicitors, is also pursuing a civil claim for damages for personal injury. The bank is understood to argue that it did not harass the couple.

Mr Mercer said: “The actions of the bank have driven my clients to the depths of despair. They have been damaged psychologically by [the Halifax’s] course of conduct.

“If this harassment case forces the Halifax to stop contacting my clients and makes the bank behave more sympathetically with customers at difficult points in their lives, then my clients will have achieved their objectives.”

The bank has given an undertaking at Exeter County Court that it will contact the couple only via Mr Mercer.

The couple are also in dispute over insurance policies against sickness or job loss taken out with the loan.

Mr Mercer said: “The amount the bank was pursuing was never clear because my client had insurances with the Halifax. He believes he would never have fallen into arrears if these had been activated in time.

“After I was instructed in June the bank contacted my clients a further three times. The bank has now given an undertaking to the court that they will not contact them again.

“Mr Lloyd is presently in remission and had recovered sufficiently to go back to work part-time but has developed a stammer and a problem with telephones.”

A spokesman for Halifax said: “These are purely allegations brought by the customers and no court ruling has actually been made against us. It is also important to stress that we have stopped all contact with the customers except through their solicitors until the matter is resolved.”

Called to account

–– David Cannon, a farmer from Northumberland, sprayed manure over several NatWest branches in a dispute over his account; he later received a £300,000 settlement

–– Brian Jones, a property developer from Bristol, let off 400 stink bombs in 87 Barclays branches after the bank approached a business partner to check his creditworthiness

–– Michael Howard changed his name to Yorkshire Bank PLC Are Fascist Bastards after he was charged £20 for a £10 overdraft

–– Darryl Workman set up the website Shabby National after Abbey National decided to charge £5 for handling third-party bills

–– Bernard Lockett wrote a 300-page book, Cul de Sac, about his dispute with Royal Bank of Scotland, which he said cost him and his wife their retirement home

–– Roger Duronio, a 64-year-old financial systems administrator from New Jersey, detonated an electronic “logic bomb”, wiping out servers at a subsidiary of UBS, when he received less than the $50,000 bonus he was expecting

–– A financial website posted details of zero-interest credit card offers with advice on which high-interest accounts to deposit the borrowed money in

Source: Times database
Resource: Timesonline