Martin Lewis

There are two possible routes for reclaiming car finance.

The easy route is the regulator's mass redress scheme.

I mean, it's called a mass redress scheme because the car finance firms themselves will have to seek out people who've been missold, even if they don't complain.

My big warning, you want to put a complaint in, it gets you there quicker and it means there can't be any, we haven't got your information issues.

We'll talk more about that in a moment.

And there are free tools online that you can complain.

I've had four million people use mine.

So, I mean, they are certainly out there.

The other alternative, the militant alternative, is to go to court.

Now, if you are going to court, that's where I am warmer to using a claims management company or a law firm to do it for you because you're going to court.

Whether you'll actually get much more net is a more open question because, of course, if you do use a claims management firm, you're going to be giving away 30% of any winnings you get and the amount a court might award after 30% off is not that dissimilar to the type of amounts the regulator's talking about.

I'd like the regulator to have been talking about a bit more and that way may well come out in the wash.

So if you're using this mass redress scheme, you don't need a claims management firm.

That's really where this is coming from.

So let's go through to what the regulator is saying.

The first thing it says is you need to work out if you have grounds to complain, which it says tends to boil down to you were signed up without agreeing to it or pressured into it.

Well, that's Nicky's case all over, isn't it?

You were misled about the service, the costs or the chance of success via the claims management firm.

Or you didn't receive information you should have been given, such as fee details or cancellation rights.

Now, that includes things like...