My account · 2014–2026
Leaving my home, losing the rent from my flat, and discovering records of an agreement I say I never made.
I say the Bank did not give me all my personal data before the Ombudsman’s decision, and I still do not have it all. Before I brought a High Court claim, I made subject access requests to the Bank in 2022 and repeatedly in 2025, and each time received only a small bundle of papers. In 2025, after bringing the claim, I obtained further personal data from the Co-operative Bank. I say some of those documents were fabricated, and seeing them had a devastating effect on my health. Even then I did not see the Bank’s servicing diary; it had never been disclosed to me. Topaz sent me its disclosure in December 2025, but I could not look at it until May 2026: I had realised the significance of the fabricated documents and needed to see a therapist. May 2026 was the first time I saw the diary.
Hundreds of the pages the Bank disclosed in 2025 lacked date fields, which made the history difficult to reconstruct, and some documents were repeated nine times in a row. The disclosure included the statement I gave to the High Court in 2022, in which I referred to being a paramedic, with undated old call records placed on either side of it. The same undated sheets were passed to Topaz. Apart from letters and the servicing diary, they are the only call notes in Topaz’s file. One of them says I “was a paramedic but had an injury and gave up”, and that I was due £50,000 from the ambulance service. I dispute the £50,000 figure and the note’s characterisation of my injuries and employment. The servicing diary itself dates the note to 10 October 2012. I will send the undated documents to the Financial Ombudsman Service. If my request for reconsideration ends in a judicial review, the Administrative Court will see the whole file, and the lack of evidence will be the evidence.
In 2012 and 2013 I taught student paramedics at Sheffield Hallam University. In late 2013 I returned to paramedic work through an agency, in the Norfolk doctors’ out-of-hours service, which the East of England Ambulance Service ran under contract. Those shifts were filled through agencies. At that time it was not possible to hold a permanent post there as a paramedic or as an Emergency Care Practitioner, which is what I was: a role that needs a paramedic or nurse with further training and experience. The Bank seems to have a problem with the title “paramedic”, but that is what I was. At various times I worked for the police, the ambulance service and out-of-hours services, and it was my paramedic registration that allowed me to do that work. I stayed with the same agency, covering out-of-hours shifts in Norfolk until 2017. I also worked occasional shifts for the out-of-hours provider in Cambridge, which employed me directly. In 2018 the agency placed me at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, and then in Lincolnshire, where I worked until 10 April 2019.
I was registered as a paramedic until 2024, and I had hoped to return. I doubt I will ever drive again, or indeed be the same again, and I am now medically retired. What happened to me in April 2019 is why the Ombudsman needs to look at the earlier history of the account, which the Co-operative Bank did not give her at the time. Because the undated notes sit in the file Topaz is now using against my home, I am happy to clear up any misunderstanding the Bank has about my occupation. Eversheds Sutherland, the Bank’s solicitors, has my contact details, and I will give it my employment history. TLT, which has acted for Topaz since I raised concerns about coordinated conduct, can have my CV if needed.
I have previously spoken to journalists about the Co-operative Bank. It is a tragedy for any homeowner to lose the place they live, particularly a family, and my case is no worse than anyone else’s. But for the “ethical” Co-op, it is not a good look when a paramedic is seriously injured while his bank is pursuing him for arrears, and it then turns out, as I say, that the Ombudsman was never told the answer to the question she asked: that on the Bank’s own figures there were no arrears at the time.
In 2025 I tried to delay the transfer of my mortgage until the data issues were resolved. I say the Co-operative Bank and Topaz Finance acted together, through the same solicitors. On 23 October 2025, the day my injunction application was referred for listing, Topaz extended a 0% interest rate on a mortgage contract that I say I had already terminated, and on which I was paying nothing. It later wrote that its reasons included allowing my application “to fall away”. Not knowing that at the time, I did not press the application. Topaz was very organised, given that I did not tell it about my injunction application until 28 October. The Land Registry application was made on 30 October, the day before the hearing. On 2 December 2025 Topaz wrote: “As your account is currently on a 0% concession, we also report that there is an arrangement in place.” My credit report shows that entry as an “Arrangement to Pay” starting on 1 November 2025. I had not agreed to any arrangement, and I did not know about it until I involved the FCA by copying it into my emails. The full sequence →
The Bank also created records stating that I had agreed to a zero-interest arrangement. I say that record of agreement was fabricated. I had stopped paying, and I had made it clear, including to the hundreds of people on my mailing list, many of whom I had helped complain about the Bank, that I did not believe any court would uphold a contract after years of relentless repossession pressure that had left me injured. I say the Bank needed a record showing that I had affirmed the contract before it passed my mortgage to Topaz, and that this was the purpose of the meeting it promised me. I say I was coerced into handing over my financial information and sensitive information about my disability. After years of repossession attempts, the Bank had written on 23 April 2025 demanding that I repay the whole mortgage within 15 working days, warning of legal action that could lead to repossession. It later said its legal action was paused; I say there was never going to be any, because it was waiting to hand me over to Topaz. The Bank said it would meet me once I had provided the information. I provided it in good faith, and the meeting was then withdrawn. On 2 July 2025 I wrote to the person at the Bank who had promised me that meeting, copied to its MAS5 mortgage mailbox: “I think that this call was more of a fishing expedition so that you could tick a few boxes.” I added: “Now I think that you are going to make me homeless, or sell my mortgage to Topaz and they will make me homeless, but I did not do anything wrong.”
The Bank’s letters then treated me as having agreed. On 9 July 2025 the Bank wrote that it had “now implemented a zero interest rate on your mortgage”: implemented, not agreed. On 17 July a MAS5 letter headed “Confirmation of Interest Rate Concession” dated the concession from 11 June 2025, the day of the call, although the servicer’s own note of that call reads “SOLUTIONS OFFERED / AGREED ACTIONS N/A”. It referred to “the agreed period”, and said the concession would be reported to the credit reference agencies as an “arrangement”, which “shows other lenders that you have agreed a plan with us”. Under the heading “What happens if I change my mind?”, it said: “You have 10 days to change your mind from the date of this letter. If you have arrears and choose not to proceed with this arrangement, you’ll continue to receive contact from us.” I had not agreed. There was no agreement for me to change my mind about. On 28 July I wrote that I did not acknowledge any debt or arrears. On 11 August I gave notice that I treated the mortgage contract as terminated, and I repeated it in writing on 13 August. On 21 August I was in the High Court. Then, on 30 September, another letter with the same heading and the same wording extended the “concession” to 22 October, still dated from 11 June. By then I wasn’t engaging with any of it: I had terminated the contract and been to court, so there was nothing left for me to decline. On 3 October I sent the letter to Eversheds and told them its content “does not alter my position” and “is not accepted as correct as to liability or sums said to be due”. I say these letters were simply building a paper trail, and that writing to a vulnerable customer in that way, after years of repossession attempts, is coercion.
The marker appeared anyway. My Experian record, last updated on 21 September 2025, shows no arrangement. My credit report of 3 April 2026 shows an “arrangement” from October 2025 to February 2026, after I had terminated the contract, been to court and told Eversheds that the letter’s content was not accepted.
Experian, last updated 21 September 2025: no arrangement ↗
Credit report, 3 April 2026: “AR” from October 2025 ↗
The arrears history is wrong too. The Ombudsman’s Final Decision told MAS5 to recalculate my mortgage at the lower rate, and said: “This will result in changes to the arrears balance from time to time, and so MAS5 should also amend Mr J’s credit file to reflect the revised position” (pages 23–24). The Bank’s own reconstruction shows no arrears, or a credit balance, every day from 12 March 2014 to 21 April 2023, and in July 2025 it told me that MAS5 “has accepted the final FOS decision and has redressed you accordingly”. Yet both records above still show me in arrears, month after month, through years when the Bank’s own figures say I owed nothing: “missed” on Experian, and arrears codes rising to “6” (six months or more behind) on the 2026 report. When I asked, the Bank said the account “would have been notionally clear of arrears” in April 2019, but that “it is not possible to definitively reconstruct your arrears balance”. The Ombudsman asked for exactly that reconstruction, and for the credit file to follow it.
On 11 February 2026, copying the FCA, I asked Topaz for the second time whether the Bank had told it that I had consented. The next day I told the Bank’s solicitors, again copying the FCA, that I had never discussed interest rates with the Capita employee whose email recorded my consent, and asked for any record of it. On 18 February Topaz replied that the Bank had told it the rate was “unilaterally applied” and that I “had not asked them to apply one”. That avoided the question I had asked, which was whether I had consented. That did not answer my question. I had neither requested nor agreed to the rate or an arrangement. Where was the evidence of my consent? In fact, when the Bank proposed extending the 0% rate and invited me to contact it if I wished to decline, I replied on 8 August 2025: “I do not acknowledge the debt. I do not accept the legitimacy of the arrears.” In April 2026 I sent the documents I say were fabricated to a journalist. I had objected in emails to the Bank in 2025, did so again in 2026, and sent those emails to the FCA as well.
With the FCA looking on, from a distance, Topaz gave me its subject access response on a memory stick. I say Topaz has been supplied with, and is willing to use, a curated repossession file, curated to defeat any claim I have. It was arranged to suggest that an injury had ended my paramedic career before 2019, and that I had affirmed the contract. In fact, I returned to paramedic work and worked until April 2019. My own Ombudsman’s Final Decision was not located in it; another borrower’s was, awarding an additional 1.25-percentage-point reduction going forward that I did not receive. In the file Topaz disclosed to me, eighty whole pages are blacked out. The servicing diary, which the Bank never provided to me, records the solicitors’ pre-action letter and the possession proceedings as both issued on 9 April 2019; the letter I hold is dated 3 April, and I was injured on 11 April.
The file also contains a rather blurred Co-op Bank email, which I had already seen in the Co-op’s own disclosure, saying the Bank had “agreed that we will implement a zero interest rate” on my mortgage. The Bank’s own email of 25 June 2025 had asked me: “Please let us know if you would like us to implement the reduced interest rate…”. That question is in the Co-op’s disclosure. In Topaz’s file, the earlier May and June exchanges come after the Bank’s 1 July email, bunched together with my own emails, and my objections are buried in a different part of the file. I doubt my correspondence would be in the file at all if I had not made a subject access request and copied in the FCA: it is out of chronological order, separate from the Bank’s curated version. The Bank’s own disclosure also contains a very crisp email stating plainly that I had consented to the zero interest rate. So many internal records that I asked for, even basic ones, were missing, but that one made it through. The only remaining problem is finding the agreement itself. Fabricating documents is serious, especially while High Court proceedings are on foot. Topaz’s file also appears to be missing the notices I sent it by Special Delivery in August 2025, before it became so keen to acquire my mortgage (Royal Mail delivered them on 12, 15 and 19 August), and the emails it replied to.
I have repeatedly asked for the evidence that I agreed to the arrangement they recorded. The responses have not answered that question. After I raised concerns about coordinated conduct, copying in the FCA, Topaz changed solicitors, but the question remains the same: where is my agreement? It remains awkwardly unanswered. The records and the responses →
Seeing a record saying I had consented, when I had not, left me feeling I could not protect my position. I told the Financial Ombudsman Service that I felt as if I was being attacked by two mortgage lenders at the same time, and I still do. By February 2026, when I had seen only the Co-op’s disclosure, I was panicking and struggling to cope, so I organised therapy. My therapist was concerned and needed to make a safeguarding report to my GP. Another third party made a safeguarding report. In my view, this is what happens when two mortgage lenders and a firm of solicitors coordinate their actions to ensure that your home is repossessed.
Last year another Co-operative Bank (MAS5) customer died. He had become a good friend, and he had also stood up to the Bank. I did not know when I first went to the High Court on 21 August 2025: he had died a month earlier, and I had been unable to contact him. It is time for a public body to step in. If none does, I will make an application to the Administrative Court, and we can have some much-needed judicial oversight. I struggle to get things written, but now that I have other help, I can manage.
To me, it feels as though I am living someone else’s life. But when you have worked as a paramedic on a response car for many years, you learn that you are on your own. You deal with whatever comes along, and it becomes second nature. It was a great career, and it made me resilient. The documents I say the Bank fabricated put me out of action for a while, as did the file passed to Topaz, but I will bounce back. Looking back, I realise that what I was put through, as many others were, was a very nasty form of institutionalised abuse. It went on for so long that I didn’t question it, and even now it is difficult to believe that I was not really in arrears. I say the Bank framed the investigation around four interest-rate increases; what happened before and after them was not in the frame.
The Service needs to consider its obligations as a public body, and its own claims about how it treats vulnerable customers and adults at risk.
During the Ombudsman’s original investigation I did not see the connection between the pressure I was under and what I did to cope with it, so I did not explain that from March 2014 until I sold my Cambridge flat in August 2017, I was living in that flat rather than in my mortgaged home.
The Co-operative Bank’s pursuit of alleged arrears—telephone calls, letters and field agents coming to the door—had made being at home unbearable. I moved into my buy-to-let flat in central Cambridge because I could no longer manage the stress. That meant carrying the costs of both properties while losing the rent the flat would otherwise have produced. In 2017, I was admitted to hospital after a serious deterioration in my mental health. I subsequently sold the flat.
At the time, I did not fully understand the connection between the pressure I was experiencing, my decisions and the harm that followed. Therapy in 2026 has helped me begin to understand experiences that I now regard as institutional abuse.
The later disclosures made that understanding more distressing. Records I received in late 2025 presented me as having agreed to a mortgage arrangement that I had never accepted. My case is that the Bank fabricated a record of consent and then relied on it to portray me as a customer participating in an agreed payment plan.
The Ombudsman had found that I had been treated unfairly by the enforcement action taken in 2019. After the head injury that occurred at that time, I was regarded as a vulnerable adult and a safeguarding concern. That is still the case today. I had not really taken in the Ombudsman’s finding until early 2025: I had been concentrating on the interest rates. Subsequent disclosures showed that my account was being managed from the Co-operative Bank’s Manchester office.
I had stopped making mortgage payments myself in mid-2024 because I did not want my payments to be treated as affirmation of the contract. My position was that the interest-rate increases had not been made in accordance with the mortgage terms and conditions, and that the Bank’s conduct had caused me considerable harm. That was my reason for withholding payment.
The Bank sent field agents to my door again. I did not speak to them. Then, in a letter dated 23 April 2025, it demanded redemption of the mortgage in full within 15 working days, warning that otherwise the account would be passed to solicitors for legal action which could result in repossession.
I wrote to the Bank on 8 May 2025. I have supplied that letter to the Financial Ombudsman Service, but I have not located a copy in either the Bank’s or Topaz’s subject-access disclosures. I explained the problems my head injury had caused, that I no longer worked, and my view that the Bank had caused considerable harm. I wanted a meeting to discuss its conduct.
When I asked further questions about my account, the Bank told me on 22 May that these had been passed to its Directors, who would be in touch separately. An email sent on behalf of a senior executive of the Bank offered a face-to-face meeting after a review of my financial position. In all, the Bank offered a meeting on three occasions.
On 9 June 2025 the Bank wrote to me: “we do not have a record of receiving a DSAR from you, but will raise this now.” Its own servicing diary records “DSAR request processed” on 5 June, four days earlier, and the papers being sent on 11 June.
I was told that I first had to provide details of my income and expenditure. I initially refused. When I eventually supplied the information to obtain the promised meeting, the Bank recast that call as my seeking support. The meeting did not take place. Instead, the Bank applied a zero interest rate and recorded that I had agreed to it.
Providing financial information to obtain a meeting was not my agreement to a new arrangement. I had made my objections clear in writing and had told the Bank that its treatment had nearly killed me. I wanted those concerns addressed. Approximately forty emails documented my dissatisfaction. During that correspondence, I was never given the option to refer those complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
25 June 2025, 09:23 · The Bank
“Thank you for sharing with my colleague [name removed] your current financial position and your personal circumstances so we can consider how best to support you at this time.”
The same email proposed 0% interest and ended:
“Please let us know if you would like us to implement the reduced interest rate…”
My account
I didn't give my financial position so that the bank could consider how best to support me. I never once asked for support. The bank deals in assertion, not evidence. When did I ask for support? Who does the bank think is going to rely on that statement when it's seen in court? Does it have any evidence for its assertion? The details of my financial position were the price of the meeting.
25 June 2025, 14:08 · My reply
“Please can you confirm that you have retracted your offer of a meeting?”
26 June 2025, 10:22 · My email
In the email I asked:
“could you kindly explain why you did not offer me a zero-interest rate in April 2019?”
26 June 2025, 12:37 · The Bank’s acknowledgment
Dear Mr Jarrett
Thank you for your emails from yesterday and this morning.
I can confirm receipt of these and we will review the contents carefully. We will respond to you in due course.
Kind Regards
MASSVR
1 July 2025 · The Bank’s internal instruction
“We have been in contact with Mr. Jarrett and agreed that we will implement a zero interest rate on his mortgage up to and including 31 August 2025.”
The email asks for the rate to be backdated to 11 June, for arrears correspondence asking for payment to stop, and for regulatory statements to continue. It says the Bank will confirm the position to me in writing and supply a copy for the record.
Open the email image ↗
2 July 2025, 07:08 · My email to the Bank
The day after the Bank’s internal instruction asserting an agreement, I wrote to the person at the Bank who had promised me a meeting, copied to its MAS5 mortgage mailbox:
“You have tricked me into handing over my financial information by being untruthful and saying that you would meet me to discuss my mortgage.”
Two days later, the servicer’s internal email recorded that I had “consented”.
4 July 2025, 13:53 · A Capita servicing employee
This email requests a 0% rate backdated to 11 June 2025, running to 31 August 2025. It asks for the confirmation letter to be reviewed by the Bank before it is sent and states:
“Mr has also consented to this.”
I dispute that record of consent.
Open the email image ↗
9 July 2025 · The Bank’s letter
“As we have completed a review of your circumstances and put measures in place to assist whilst you wait for your SMI claim outcome, we do not feel a face to face meeting would be productive.”
Bank letter, 9 July 2025, page 2 (E-DEN-01).
28 July 2025, 09:19 · My email
“I expressly do not acknowledge or admit the existence of any debt, arrears, or liability to MAS5/The Co-operative Bank.”
I also stated that any DWP payment would be made:
“under economic duress and without my voluntary consent.”
13 August 2025, 13:07 · My email
Earlier in this email I described an attempt to induce me into:
“affirming the contract and accepting forbearance measures (neither of which I did)”
I then wrote:
“this manipulation — this ham-fisted attempt to extract an impression of affirmation — is yet further evidence that you have repudiated the contract.”
26 August 2025 · My email
Previous notice. I refer to my Notice of Termination and Litigation Hold dated 11 August 2025. The mortgage contract is at an end; I accepted your repudiatory breach. Alternatively, I treat the contract as rescinded. Nothing here is affirmation or waiver.
SMI handling. Any SMI paid by DWP is received under duress and under protest solely to mitigate possession risk while proceedings are live. Please hold any SMI in suspense, do not treat it as an acknowledgment or affirmation, do not report it to CRAs as an admission, and preserve full allocation logs.
Despite that notice, the Bank reported to credit reference agencies that I was in an arrangement to pay. Topaz subsequently did the same. Eversheds, which had acted for both lenders, then wrote on behalf of MAS5 and the Co-operative Bank on 28 April 2026 that I had not “raised concerns” about that reporting previously.
I had not agreed to a zero-interest arrangement or a payment plan. Having made my position clear in writing, I did not expect to have to check my credit file to make sure my wishes had been respected. Discovering records at the end of 2025 which I say fabricated my consent, and then confronting the credit reporting and this response, caused significant harm to my mental health.
I repeatedly sought my personal data so that I could establish what the Bank had recorded and passed to others. Although it supplied material, I maintain that its responses remained incomplete. In August 2025, I went to the High Court seeking to stop the proposed transfer of my mortgage. My witness statement explained why I had participated in the financial-information call and that I had not accepted forbearance or affirmed the contract.
The August application was adjourned with liberty to restore. After the account transferred to Topaz Finance in October, I applied in my personal-data proceedings to stop registration of the transfer and enforcement while the outstanding data issues were addressed.
On 23 October 2025, the same day the court referred my injunction application for listing before a High Court judge, Topaz confirmed a four-month extension of the zero interest rate. I had not informed Topaz of my application by that date.
On 28 October 2025, Eversheds Sutherland informed me:
“Further to your email below please note we are not instructed by Topaz Finance Ltd.
As such, service of documents upon us on behalf of Topaz is not accepted and nor is it effective.”
I then gave Topaz notice directly on 28 October.
In its letter dated 2 December 2025, page 2, answer 4, Topaz/Aspiro subsequently wrote:
“Instead, like MAS 5/ the Co-op, we engage Eversheds as our solicitors, although such instruction is entirely coincidental. Eversheds are instructed to accept service of proceedings on our behalf.”
These statements were made on different dates. I have asked the firms to explain when that instruction began and ended.
In a separate email on 6 November, in an exchange I copied to the FCA, Topaz expressly confirmed that it would take no enforcement action during the period from November 2025 to February 2026. The rate extension and this later confirmation of a standstill were separate communications.
Topaz subsequently explained in writing that its reasons for extending the rate included allowing time for the transfer to be registered at the Land Registry and for my injunction application “to fall away”. The Land Registry’s alert recorded a registration application on 30 October—the day before the hearing. Registration was completed on 11 November.
Facing a claim for about £9,000 in costs, and not knowing the full position on the day because I had not been told it, I did not press the application. On 31 October it was dismissed without an order for costs. The defendants asked for it to be recorded as “totally without merit”, and to avoid the costs claim I did not oppose that wording. The judge later clarified in writing that the designation concerned that application only, not the merits of my underlying claims, and that because it had been presented to him as agreed, he had not been invited to disagree with it. I did not then know that Topaz would later explain that it had extended the zero interest rate partly to allow my injunction application “to fall away”. Had I known then what Topaz later wrote about its reasons, I would have pressed the application. I contend that the extension was intended to prevent my injunction application from succeeding.
I do not know whether the court knew of Topaz’s reasons, and I have no reason to think the volunteer barrister who helped me on the day knew either.
Topaz later told me, in a letter copied to the FCA, that my application had been “struck out as being entirely without merit”. The judge had refused it, and his written note says there is “no determination” that either of my claims is “totally without merit”.
Topaz says it is “a completely separate entity” that “has acted independently”, and that its use of the same solicitors as the Bank was “entirely coincidental”. Yet it says that before the transfer it exchanged limited information with MAS5 and the Bank “under common interest privilege”.
The credit reporting compounded my concerns. The Bank had said that an arrangement marker would tell other lenders that I had agreed a plan. My Experian record subsequently showed a Topaz “Arrangement to Pay” with a start date of 1 November 2025. I dispute that reporting because I had not agreed such a plan. That displayed start date does not establish when the marker was first reported or when I first saw it.
I say the evidence shows Topaz was very keen to secure my mortgage, and to record me as having agreed an arrangement I never agreed.
Topaz’s solicitors later said the rate was a forbearance measure that did not need my agreement, while continuing to defend the accuracy of the credit reporting.
The file passed to Topaz presented the Bank’s assertion of agreement while my objections appeared separately in later batches, and I say they would not have been there at all if I had not kept the FCA copied in my DSAR request emails. My own Ombudsman’s Final Decision was not located in the disclosed file; another borrower’s was there, awarding an additional 1.25-percentage-point reduction going forward that I did not receive. Eversheds Sutherland, for the Bank, still refers to “MAS 5’s agreement to apply a 0% interest concession”. I say Eversheds and the Bank are using that wording to make it appear that I agreed to an arrangement I did not agree to. TLT, for Topaz, says it is content with the file as it was handed over.
Discovering these records left me feeling that I could not protect my position if the firms could record an agreement I had never made. I reported my concerns to the FCA and the Ombudsman.
On 16 April 2026, I sent a formal notice about the disputed records, credit reporting and resulting harm, copying the FCA. A week later, Eversheds Sutherland said it was no longer instructed by Topaz, which subsequently used TLT. That sequence is documented; the reason for the change of solicitors remains unexplained.
2 December 2025 · Topaz/Aspiro
“MAS5 informed us that they had decided to place your account on a 0% concession…”
Topaz said it had neither been given the rationale nor been consulted about implementation.
Topaz/Aspiro’s letter, answer 7, p. 4.
18 February 2026, 16:35 · Topaz/Aspiro
Answering the question I had renewed on 11 February, Topaz wrote:
“The Co-operative Bank informed us that they had unilaterally applied a 0% concession to your account – in other words, they informed us that you had not asked them to apply one.”
16 April 2026, 15:12 · My formal notice
“If your clients contend that I ever discussed, requested, accepted, or agreed to any 0% interest arrangement, or any other arrangement said to affect my legal position, then identify by return the precise document, call note, recording, email, letter, or other contemporaneous record relied upon.”
The FCA was included among the recipients.
28 April 2026 · Eversheds Sutherland for MAS5 and the Co-operative Bank
Paragraphs 5–12 are reproduced below with their original paragraph numbers.
- In your 16 April 2026 you complain that MAS 5 falsely reported, to credit reference agencies, that your mortgage account was in an arrangement.
- As this is not something you have raised concerns about previously, our clients have investigated this as a new complaint and you can treat this as our clients’ final response letter.
Our clients’ investigations
- To investigate your complaint, our clients have reviewed their records and the correspondence relating to MAS 5’s agreement to apply a 0% interest concession to your mortgage account.
- Our clients do not accept that any credit reporting undertaken in relation to your mortgage account was false. On the contrary, our clients were entitled, and in certain respects obliged, to report the status of your account to credit reference agencies in accordance with applicable regulatory, contractual and industry requirements.
- The Bank, in a letter dated 9 July 2025, confirmed that it had implemented a zero interest rate concession in respect of your mortgage account and confirmed that this would remain in place until the end of September 2025.
- Similarly, MAS 5, in letters dated 17 July 2025 and 30 September 2025 communicated to you the action it was taking, namely that it was reducing the interest rate to 0%. Both letters advised you to get in touch, within 10 days of the date of the respective letters, if you did not think the arrangement was right for you.
- Reporting this as an “arrangement” to credit reference agencies was, in any event, to your advantage. The alternative would have been to continue reporting that your account was in arrears.
Final response
- As your 16 April 2026 email raised a new complaint not previously raised with us or our clients, as per paragraph 6 of this letter, you may treat this letter as our clients’ final response to your complaint regarding credit reporting, as summarised above.
Eversheds Sutherland, 28 April 2026, paragraphs 5–12. This response concerns MAS5 and the Co-operative Bank. Topaz/Aspiro’s own final response is a separate letter dated 8 June 2026.
The firms still need to explain how that correspondence justified recording my consent to a plan and reporting an “Arrangement to Pay”, particularly when Topaz subsequently described the rate as unilaterally applied and its solicitors accepted that the rate did not evidence my agreement, consent or affirmation.
For me, this is a question of accountability. Banks, lenders and the solicitors acting for them must answer for the records they create and the conduct they pursue. Institutions entrusted with protecting customers must also answer for how they respond when those records and that conduct are challenged.
Where the public bodies responsible for protection fail, I believe their decisions must be open to scrutiny in the High Court.
I was not giving the Bank permission to apply the rate. I was continuing to challenge its conduct, not agreeing to its proposal.
I had withheld my own payments since mid-2024 because I did not intend to affirm the contract. I made no payments after that email; the only payment the Bank received was the single £610 SMI payment, which I addressed in my written notices. I made no agreement to a payment plan. The firms should identify the agreement they say I made.
The Bank later told Topaz that it had “unilaterally applied” the rate, and that I “had not asked them to apply one”.