FCA confirms car finance tribunal dates, warns on CMC fees

Three motor lenders spent a year arguing about when their case would finally be heard. They now have an answer.

The Upper Tribunal will hear the legal challenges to the FCA’s motor finance redress scheme between 16 and 26 February 2027, the regulator confirmed this week, in its own statement. FCA

A December 2026 slot had also been pencilled in since the summer. That window is gone, and with it any realistic chance of a ruling before the new year, since payments are now unlikely before 2027 at the earliest, Insurance Business UK reports.

Here is my problem.

A precise hearing date is not a precise payout date. The tribunal has told lenders and claimants exactly which ten days their arguments will be tested in court. It has told nobody yet when, or whether, any money moves once the judges have spoken.

It is the logic of a tout outside a free clinic, offering to walk a patient straight to the front of a queue that was always going to move at its own pace regardless of who paid.

A ruling is not the only cost a driver owed money should worry about between now and February. In the same statement confirming the hearing dates, the FCA warned about a different one entirely. Claims management companies and law firms, it said, may charge up to 36 per cent of any compensation, for a complaint the lender is already required to handle free of charge, and it told drivers plainly not to sign up with more than one, since each may charge its own fee for the same case.

Nobody yet knows what the tribunal will decide, or how much compensation will actually reach the drivers this scheme was built for. What a driver can already decide, today, is whether to let a claims firm take a slice of whatever does arrive.

A fixed hearing date is not a fixed payment date, and the regulator confirming one is the same regulator warning against paying someone else to chase the other.