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Started 20:00 BBC Radio
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upcoming broadcasts of PPI: Britain's Biggest Banking Scandal (2)
Duration:
40 minutes
First broadcast:
Tuesday 25 March 2014
In February, Lloyds Banking Group set aside a further £1.8bn to compensate
its customers who were mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance. It's the sixth
time in less than three years the bank has had to revise upwards the level of
compensation due and brings the bill so far for Lloyds alone to £9.8bn. Across
Britain's banks as a whole, compensation costs have now reached more than £22bn
- a sum so large, some economists ironically even credit these payments with
having helped boost the economic recovery. How did Britain's biggest ever
mis-selling scandal happen and why did it lead to claims management companies
being able to rake in billions of pounds from the disaster?
With testimony from insiders, Michael Robinson tells the unbelievable story
of PPI. How in their greed to make more and more profit from selling the
protection, the banks demanded ever bigger commission payments from providers of
cover while ensuring it was less and less likely a claim would ever succeed. The
programme hears how industry whistleblowers were repeatedly ignored and asks why
the regulators failed to act sooner. And it shows how the banks' reluctance to
acknowledge what they'd done opened up the floodgates to complaints and spawned
a whole new breed of claims management companies making vast profits from
customers who had already fallen victim to bankers' greed.
While the banks now insist they've learned the lesson of the PPI disaster,
Michael Robinson asks if they have really changed their ways
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