Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) is effectively a personal loan which allows drivers to spread the payments for a vehicle over a long period, typically two or three years. However, unlike a normal personal loan, you won't be paying off the full value of the car and you won't necessarily own it at the end of the deal, unless you choose to pay the final balloon payment. PCP is one of the more complex financial products available to help you buy a car, but it can be broken down into three main parts: the deposit, the amount you borrow and the balloon payment.

The more details you can recall about your agreement, the more likely it will be that the finance company can locate and verify you against their systems promptly. This will also help avoid requests for further information which can delay a decision being made.

Dealers use PCP finance to draw in people who want to change their car every few years. 73% of new cars in 2014 were bought using PCP, making it the most prevalent financial product in the market.

It is mandatory for car finance companies to keep records of all their customer's transactions and dealings for at least 6 years.

If you paid off your Finance Deal more than 6 years ago, there may not be any available paperwork for you. However, there have been cases in which claims have been made against cases of mis-selling over 20 years ago, often without paperwork.

The misconception around car finance is that the product being sold is a car. This is only partly true. In fact, the main product that is being sold is a financial product which is a loan. The car is a red herring that has deflected the public eye away from this sector of credit broking meaning it has not been under as much scrutiny as, say, mortgages. The concept of PCP itself is also relatively new.

We are certain that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will introduce what is known as a redress scheme in 2025, to be implemented in 2026, where they will require lenders including your lender, to write to clients either telling them that they will process your claim automatically, or providing you with a simple route to do so. In other words, you do not need to utilize a solicitor or a claims management company to process your claim and of course if you processed the claim yourself, you would not need to pay a fee for a solicitor or claims management company to assist you. We want to make this point clear to you.

We are explaining this as the term can sometimes be misunderstood. The term means that if you do not win your claim there is no fee payable and that if you do win your claim there is a fee payable. Sometimes clients with other firms of solicitors have failed to win a claim and still had to pay some type of costs. This is not the position with your case. The only circumstances where you would pay a fee is if your claim was successful. Those fees are in the table in the attached Damages based agreement – DBA (No Win No Fee Agreement). We do not litigate these cases and do not incur any costs on your behalf beyond the charges we make which are in the attached DBA and only payable where we win your case, and so there will never be a circumstance where your claim fails and you incur any costs.