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Thousands of graduates are still owed millions of pounds after overpaying their student loans

Two years ago, your humble correspondent received a dodgy-looking email promising a £500 cash payment simply for calling a Glasgow phone number. It turned out not to be dodgy at all. 

The Student Loans Company, it emerged, had continued taking loan repayments long after your correspondent’s full loan balance had been repaid. It was a quirk of the system: the SLC and the Treasury communicated only once a year about where graduates were up to with their loan repayments—an oversight that meant tens of thousands of graduates were overpaying through pay-as-you-earn without even noticing it.