Hi floblack

Every practitioner has a governing body, normally ICAS or the IPA.

Could you clarify what the problem is exactly? If it's creditors contacting you, sometimes this is outwith the control of the IP.

Mark

Hi floblack and welcome to the forum.

While I'm glad to hear you are approaching completion of your trust deed, I'm very sorry to hear that you have been unhappy about the way that your trust deed has been run. One of the recurrent themes on this forum is the huge variance in service levels that different trust deed providers seem to deliver.

We ran a survey of visitors and members last year and the results were in some areas quite worrying and in other areas quite reassuring. A significant minority of respondants said that the service they received from their trust deed company was poor or extremely bad. The great majority of respondants however said that overall going ahead with a trust deed had been the right decision for them.

Our analysis of these results was that a very effective debt solution is being delivered badly by a few trust deed providers.

Most people were happy with both the debt solution that they had chosen and the company they had chosen to deliver it. When things go wrong however the consequences can cause a heck of a lot of frustration and concern for those on the end of it.

In terms of your specific question you can complain directly to your Trustee (the individual named on your paperwork) and they must look into your complaint. If you are unhappy with their response you can complain to their regulatory body, which very often is ICAS but may be another such body. These details should be on the footer of any paperwork you have received. I can reassure you that the regulatory bodies are rigorous in holding Insolvency Practitioners to professional standards and take serious action whenever malpractice is discovered.

My experience suggests that the regulation of Insolvency Practitioners is more focussed upon following guidance, legislation and statutory deadlines than it is upon delivering high levels of service. That's certainly an area of potential improvement that your experience once again highlights could/should be looked at.

I don't think there is widespread mis-selling of protected trust deeds, but this forum and our survey certainly does evidence that a minority of trust deed providers pay scant regard to service-provision once they've persuaded somone to sign on the dotted line. A careful choice of trust deed provider is therefore very important though I appreciate this is difficult when so many companies are promising so much.

Hopefully there will be no issues with the closure of your case, there aren't normally, and please let us know how you get on if you choose to take things further.

Hi TDA
Whilst the surveys you've carried out are interesting and encouraging it would be useful to have a comparison of the performance of specific IP's and their intermediaries. The success of ones TD and ones future is in the hands of these people. Since the payments and expenditure allowances may change in the course of the TD it's important to get a feel for what will happen over the next three years not just whats in the initial proposal. Though I appreciate it might be inappropriate for this particular site to provide such a thing.
Best Regards
Snowball

Hi Snowball.

I agree that this type of information would be extremely useful. Thank you for raising the point.

The difficulty is in how you would go about gathering it. Our survey doesn't attract enough responses to provide statistically relevant information on a company by company basis. Providing online open access to rate companies is open to abuse by the companies themselves and the information often ends up being worthless or dangerous (we've watched this happen elsewhere).

Due to these difficulties we focus, in this forum and in articles/stories in our "trust deed news" section, on trying to arm visitors with information that will help them to make an informed decision for themselves.

On top of that there's plenty of anecdotal evidence from visitors/members around the forum. A few company names seem to pop up much more frequently than others.

Not perfect we know... but hopefully useful to some visitors all the same.