Plaid Cymru Credit Union - not much of a credit to the party?

Andrew Nutt posts a rather bitter post about his experience of Undeb Credyd Plaid Cymru Credit Union

I empathise with him because I had a similar problem with UCPCCU some years ago; when unfortunate circumstances resulted in me losing my health, my business, my job and my home shortly after the expense of my marriage and the birth of my first child.

I had, a few months earlier, when I though that I was flush for life, borrowed a sum of money from UCPCCU, not because I needed it, but in order to support the Plaid Cymru Credit Union cause.

When a health disaster struck and I lost everything it hurt that people I thought of as friends, who I would have expected to have been supportive and sympathetic of my plight, started sending threatening letters and using credit collection agencies against me. It hurt most bitterly.

My case ended up in the County Court; with a company from Halifax, which objected to my insistence that the hearing should be held in Welsh in Wales claiming to represent Plaid!

I won and the Judge offered me expenses and compensation in excess of what Plaid claimed I owed, but I refused his offer because I wouldn't do that to Plaid Cymru – much to my wife's annoyance.

The judgement was scathing in its condemnation of UCPCCU's lack of unemployment and disability insurance on its loans policies and its ruthlessness in pursuing people who used the CU services out of loyalty to the cause, rather than using services that might have offered better protection to customers who encountered difficulties.

Because Credit Unions are, in essence, a banking service for the poorest in society, the district judge said that they should have the strongest safeguards for those who encountered unexpected financial difficulties; and that PCCU seemed to approach their business as a party political fund raising venture rather than a proper CU service.

Mr Nutt's experience suggests that UCPCCU has ignored the County Court Judges' advice given in my case; or worse still, that they never even received his good advice because they had sold my loan to a loan shark in Halifax who never bothered to pass the judgement back to them!