PPI, gender gap, pensions and property

Lloyds Banking Group has set aside a further £1 billion to pay compensation for mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI).

The extra provision was expected after the deadline for PPI claims was extended to June 2019. The announcement came as the bank announced that pre-tax profits for the three months to the end of September fell 15 per cent to £811 million, the BBC reports. In other PPI news, the Daily Mail reports that thousands of divorced women deprived of PPI payouts by NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland will now receive compensation.

State-backed RBS-NatWest failed to pay separated and divorced women their legal share of payouts for mis-sold PPI. In an email, the bank, which is 73 per cent owned by the taxpayer, admits it was in the wrong and has changed its policy.

Gender gap

Women work on average 39 more days a year than men, according to the World Economic Forum.

The BBC reports that women work on average 50 minutes more a day than men, data from the WEF’s Global Gender Gap report suggests. The report says the prevalence of unpaid work burdens women and estimates that economic inequalities between the sexes could take 170 years to close. The gap in economic opportunity, the WEF says, is now larger than at any point since 2008. Pensions

Hundreds of thousands of pensioners could use a little-known law to cash in rip-off annuities — but insurers are standing in the way.

Money Mail has uncovered an obscure legal loophole that enables over-55s to cash in annuities for pots worth less than £10,000.

The legislation, allegedly buried by government officials, offers a lifeline to pensioners who are locked into deals that turned their savings into a retirement income.

Housing

Want to live somewhere you actually own? Well, you’ll have to wait 121 years. That’s how long it would take for the average Londoner to save for a deposit for a flat. This is if they saved 10 per cent of their average salary each year – and had no access to the Bank of Mum and Dad or, as the housing minister would have it, the Bank of Nan and Grandad. The research, carried out by property crowdfunding website Property Partner and reported in The Telegraph, took a Londoner’s average salary of £34,320, and calculated how long they would have to save for a deposit in each borough. This is assuming a mortgage of four times the buyer’s salary. In Kensington and Chelsea, it would take 389 years to save a deposit for an average flat in the borough. In other property news, Post Office Money Mortgages says that the average UK property takes 91 days to sell. Its report, which examines the average time a property takes to sell in 20 major cities across the UK, found that sellers in Bristol and Edinburgh had the least amount of time to wait, with homes spending 51 and 53 days on the market, respectively. 

Cities to the west of the UK were most likely to see a long wait with residences in Swansea and Liverpool taking the longest to be sold –  a typical property taking over 100 days (100 and 108 respectively) to sell in both of the cities.

Vodafone

Telecoms operator Vodafone has been fined £4.6 million by Ofcom for ‘serious and sustained breaches of consumer protection rules’.

The regulator said Vodafone had misled pay-as-you-go customers, charging them for top-up credit but ‘providing nothing in return’. It also found Vodafone had broken the rules on handling customer complaints. Vodafone offered its ‘profound apologies’ for the failures said it was ‘determined to put everything right’. Disputes

A new study from Co-op Insurance has found that one in five Brits have been involved in a dispute with their neighbour in the last 12 months. Almost half have moved house to escape the dispute.

Of those who have experienced nuisance neighbours, excessive noise was by far the biggest single cause of residential issues nationally, with over two fifths of Brits experiencing noise related issues, including stomping around the house, loud arguments and late night parties. Nearly one in four have suffered rude or abusive neighbours and a further 21 per cent have had problems with barking dogs or wars over parking (19 per cent).

Energy

Over three quarters of homeowners will take steps to ration the amount of energy they use this winter. Energy saving tactics will include leaving it as long as possible before turning on the central heating, leaving rooms unheated and reducing the use of energy-hungry appliances.

The research, commissioned by Gocompare.com Energy, found that 32 per cent of homeowners will have to actively manage the amount of heating they use this winter, with one in 10 worried about how they will pay their fuel bills and 7 per cent expecting to make cutbacks elsewhere to be able to afford to heat their homes.

Financial support

Parents and children are banking on financial support from each other, according to the latest findings from SunLife’s Cash Happy report.

The research shows that while one in six 55-65s are expecting to be supported financially by their grown up kids when they retire, one in five adult children are relying on inheritance from their parents (up from 17 [per cent last year).

Furthermore, one in ten grown up children are relying on this inheritance so much that they think their parents are blowing too much of it.