Barclays Bank UK PLC · DRN-3763345

The complaint Miss N complains that Barclays Bank UK PLC, trading as Barclaycard, lent to her irresponsibly and provided credit that was unaffordable for her. What happened In September 2019 Miss N took out a credit card with Barclaycard. The card had a limit of £800. The limit was never increased. Miss N explains that she was in a bad financial position when she took out the credit card. She says she had defaults and a County Court Judgement (CCJ) on her credit record and was relying on benefits and the income from a part-time job. She says that she was in debt at the time to a doorstep loan company. She says if Barclaycard had done reasonable checks it would have realised the lending was unsustainable for her. Miss N asked that Barclaycard close her account as satisfied and remove negative information from her credit file. The investigator who reviewed the complaint didn’t think that Barclaycard had lent to Miss N irresponsibly. Miss N disagreed, so the complaint has been passed to me to make a decision. What I’ve decided – and why I’ve considered all the available evidence and arguments to decide what’s fair and reasonable in the circumstances of this complaint. We’ve set out our general approach to complaints about unaffordable and irresponsible lending - including the key relevant rules, guidance and good industry practice - on our website and I’ve taken that into account when considered Miss N ’s complaint. Having done so, I’ve come to the same conclusion as our investigator. I will explain why I have reached this decision. Barclaycard needed to take reasonable steps to ensure it didn’t lend irresponsibly. In practice this means that it should have carried out proportionate checks to make sure Miss N could afford to repay what she was being lent in a sustainable manner. These checks could take into account a number of different things, such as how much was being lent, the repayment amounts, Miss N ’s borrowing history and her income and expenditure. Barclaycard has provided the results of the checks it did when it agreed Miss N’s application. I can see from this that Miss N had only three external accounts, each with a small balance outstanding. Two of these were loans, with a total balance of £423 between them, and the third was a mail order account with £324 outstanding.

-- 1 of 2 --

The credit checks didn’t show any recent CCJs or other adverse information. Miss N has provided evidence that she had a CCJ in 2016. But this was over three years before her Barclaycard application and there was no evidence to suggest to Barclaycard that she was facing current difficulties. Barclaycard asked Miss N about her income and expenditure. Miss N declared an income of £25,668 per annum and committed expenditure of £1,100 per month; this meant she had a disposable income of around £430 a month. Miss N has later explained that she was on statutory sick pay at the time of her application, but I don’t think this means that the checks Barclaycard did at the time weren’t adequate. It was entitled to rely on the income Miss N had declared. I asked both parties for more information. The credit check data Barclaycard provided indicated that Miss N had more mail order accounts than on first appearances. Barclaycard responded explaining that this was an error. As I haven’t seen any other information to indicate there were 27 mail order accounts (and Miss N hasn’t suggested there was) I accept Barclaycard’s explanation. Miss N has said that she held three doorstep loans at the time, totalling £2,371. These don’t appear on the credit checks Barclaycard received from TransUnion, its data provider. Miss N has provided screenshots of the existence of these loans at the time of her application but hasn’t provided the full credit report that I requested. The screenshots provided don’t clearly link the doorstep loans to Miss N. Miss N says that when the provider became insolvent the loans were written off, but that doesn’t explain why they weren’t in the reported data at the time of her application. It may be that the loan provider didn’t report the loans to her credit file, but this would be very unusual. And in that case, I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold Barclaycard accountable for another lender’s shortcomings. I also remind myself that Miss N declared repayments of only £32 a month for loans when she provided details of her expenditure to Barclaycard. On the balance of probabilities, which is the test I have to apply, I think Barclaycard obtained a reasonable amount of information about Miss N and her ability to repay and there was nothing to suggest to Barclaycard that Miss N wouldn’t be able to sustainably repay the credit it provided. So, while I know this will be disappointing for Miss N, I don’t think Miss N lost out as a result of anything Barclaycard did wrong. My final decision I don’t uphold Miss N’s complaint, so it follows that Barclays Bank UK Plc, trading as Barclaycard, doesn’t have to do anything futher. Under the rules of the Financial Ombudsman Service, I’m required to ask Miss N to accept or reject my decision before 3 January 2023. Sally Allbeury Ombudsman

-- 2 of 2 --