Banks might appeal a recent court decision over whether or not their penalty charges are unfair.
Banks seem set to appeal a recent High Court ruling involving the penalty fees levied by seven banks and building society Nationwide, the BBC reports.
The verdict, delivered last month, was that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) should be allowed to examine whether or not the charges were unfairly high or not. Penalties include those for offences such as breaking overdraft limits and bouncing a cheque.
The penalties were the subject of a consumer revolt last year, with hundreds of thousands of customers contacting their banks in order to claim them back. All of these cases were frozen with the calling of the High Court case in July, which means that the banks' appeal is likely to delay their resolution for several months.
An anonymous banking source told the broadcaster that a challenge to the verdict was "under consideration". Should the appeal proceed, the case could eventually be put before the House of Lords, the nation's highest legal authority.
The option also remains for the OFT to appeal the High Court's ruling, which also rejected claims the consumer body had made that the bank charges were "unfair" under common law, and that customer contracts containing details of them were not in "plain and intelligible language".
Penalty charges are worth around £3.5 billion per year to banks.
