Are you certain you aren’t still owed money for mis-sold PPI?

I find it absolutely incredible that the compensation for miss-sold PPI policies is forecast to be of the order of £27,000,000,000 [twenty-seven billion pounds]. Just think about it for a moment. That’s over £1,000 for every household in the country. If half never had such a policy that makes it £2,000 for every one that did. Can that be right? Surely not all policies were miss-sold. The compensation consists of policy premiums refunded and interest to the date of refund.

The problem is that the banks were unable prove that the policies were not miss-sold, which is the test. Unfortunately the banks’ records are so deficient on these points that they have become completely exposed to the compensation claims. A policy was miss-sold if the bank or other lender did not undertake a proper fact-find, or if they did not exercise due diligence in issuing a policy, or just set up the policy without express consent. What, never? Every bank? This must be one of the worst cases of gross corporate incompetence ever and has cost all customers dear through unnecessarily high charges as the banks have still made huge profits. The impact of this appalling mismanagement and negligence doesn’t seem to have hit share prices or directors’ remuneration especially. Another disgusting aspect is that a sizeable chunk of any compensation awarded has been captured by the parasitic claims management companies – needlessly so since the banks could have made it much clearer that customers could easily claim directly and they could even have said that they would not entertain any claims routed through a claims company. There is also the cost of the work undertaken by the Financial Ombudsman service, the Financial Conduct Authority and previous regulators in dealing with appeals and policy issues – I would hope those costs have been charged to the banks involved and is included in the £27 bn.

Like everyone else I was fed up with third parties’ cold calling but when I read the Which article and saw that all I had to do was to write to my former bank, Barclays, using the template letter provided. I left Barclays thirteen years ago and have kept no records so I simply provided my former address and date of birth. Within a week I received a letter of acknowledgement – and then, a couple of weeks later ( the day before yesterday) a cheque for £550 arrived in the post! Thank you Which!