If like me you’re plagued by Payment Protection Insurance phone calls, then it may interest you to know that cold callers have made at least £5 billion by bombarding the public with nuisance calls and texts.
According to a report by MPs, failures by the Government and the City have encouraged the growth of the claims management industry, which makes up to 84 million unwanted calls a week. MPs on the Public Accounts Committee said that these firms are permitted to pocket as much as a quarter of PPI refunds. Almost half of all nuisance calls are from companies wanting to manage PPI claims, according to consumer group Which?.
Consumers can complain directly to the Ombudsman free of charge – yet so far, 80 per cent of those who have done so, have chosen to go through claims management companies. Since April 2011, more than £22 billion has been paid out in compensation to those who were sold the insurance policies by banks, but did not necessarily need them.The committee of MPs also warned there are substantial and continuing risks that financial services will be mis-sold – finding too little has been done to tackle the cultural problems behind mis-selling. The committee urged the Financial Conduct Authority and Treasury to ‘do more to know how much mis-selling is happening now, and which regulatory activities work best to prevent it’.
More dodgy dealings have been revealed thanks to a new survey by Privilege Insurance. The study found that 6.6 million people in Britain have fallen victim to internet scams and online fraud in the last year alone. The survey examined takeovers to fraudulent websites, online shopping scams and phishing emails. In the last 12 months, one in three have seen inappropriate pop-ups, one in five have accidentally downloaded a virus on their computer by clicking on an attachment and one in ten have had their emails hacked. The Times reports that the Bank of England has cut its growth forecasts and signalled that interest rates may rise earlier than expected. Higher savings levels as families grapple with their debts and weaker productivity than the Bank was projecting three months ago weighed on the outlook for the economy, also hitting jobs. However, the Bank said inflation would overshoot its 2 per cent target within two years, putting an early interest rate rise on the table. There’s a story in the Daily Mail claiming that parents are being ‘held to ransom’ by holiday companies with research showing that some breaks double in price after the schools break up. A study of 79 holidays offered this summer by the likes of Thomas Cook, Thomson and First Choice found huge price hikes. The average increase was 35 per cent, potentially adding hundreds of pounds to the cost of a family holiday for four.Meanwhile, figures obtained by BBC Breakfast show that more than 600 bank branches have closed across the UK in the last year, with rural areas worst affected. Parts of Wales, Scotland and the South West of England lost the most banks per head of population. Five of the top 10 areas losing banks are in Wales: Powys, Denbighshire, Gwynedd, Conwy, and Carmarthenshire. The banks said that demand for branches was falling, as more people switch to banking online.
The Guardian reports that super-rich international investors in London property are likely to sell off some of their mansions and penthouses after the introduction of anti-corruption rules cracking down on offshore secrecy. Trevor Abrahmsohn, owner of Glentree Estates, which has sold property to billionaires from Russia, Nigeria and China, told the paper that privacy-hungry oligarchs, media owners and tech billionaires from around the world could also abandon plans to buy homes in Britain because they would no longer be able to keep their identity secret by purchasing them through offshore companies.According to the UK’s largest chartered surveyor, April saw a slowdown in house purchase approvals. The latest Mortgage Monitor from e.surv showed that house purchase approvals in April totalled 57,512, down 19.4 per cent from the 71,357 loans granted the previous month. This substantial fall follows a previous three-month average of 72,693 house purchase approvals since the start of 2016. Economic uncertainty is playing a role in this drop, as is the new tax regime for buy-to-let purchases,
Finally, there’s a sliver of good news for homeowners struggling to meet their mortgage repayments. The number of repossessions in the first quarter of 2016 was 2,100 (1,500 home-owner, 600 buy-to-let), meaning that the repossession rate is the lowest on record, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. If this rate continued through 2016, it would put the annual number of repossessions at 8,400, lower than any year since 1982.
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