PPI...off

[Grumpi]

According to BBC Business page some think tank spokesman says the cost of PPI reparations (or at least the provision the banks are making) will be £53,000,000,000*. It seems there were eight months worth of claims made in the last month.

He actually used the "b" word (£53bn) but I refuse to use billion to mean less than a million million.
That's what I was taught at school here in the UK and I see no need to change.

[Watis]

<snip>

He actually used the "b" word (£53bn) but I refuse to use billion to mean less than a million million.
That's what I was taught at school here in the UK and I see no need to change.

Me too, but that's decimalisation for you.

Watis

[tjh290633]

Better to use M£ (Mega) or G£ (Giga) rather than m£ (milli) or b£ which does not compute.

TJH

[Dod101]

Just for laughs I clicked on one of the Facebook ads for "Did you transfer your pension into a SIPP? You could be due compensation!"

There's a questionnaire to go through, and the only question I answered in the affirmative was "Was your pension moved into a SIPP?" (note it didn't even ask what type of pension it was).

And the result? "[i]Based on your answers, we believe you could have been mis-sold your SIPP Pension and may be eligible for compensation.[/i

In our (very) local newspaper I see today an ad headed 'Scottish Miners Pension Compensation'. No apostrophe but never mind. It goes on to say that 'We are successfully claiming compensation for former Scottish miners who transferred out of the Mineworkers Pension Scheme', and then goes on to say 'Other Workers Affected' and lists Steel Workers, British Rail, BT, Civil Service, Dockers, Armed Forces, NHS, and as a catch all, adds Manufacturing and Services.

Corries Solicitors of York ought to have enough work for some time to come.

Where will this compensation culture end? And who is paying for it? We all are one way or another and probably nearly all of us would seem to eligible to make some claim so my simple mind asks 'Does this all not just even out?' Only the middle men (as always) are actually making money.

Dod

[bungeejumper]

In our (very) local newspaper I see today an ad headed 'Scottish Miners Pension Compensation'. No apostrophe but never mind. It goes on to say that 'We are successfully claiming compensation for former Scottish miners who transferred out of the Mineworkers Pension Scheme', and then goes on to say 'Other Workers Affected' and lists Steel Workers, British Rail, BT, Civil Service, Dockers, Armed Forces, NHS, and as a catch all, adds Manufacturing and Services.

I'm sure that they are indeed successfully claiming compensation on behalf of "miners". Their claim would have been more impressive if they had said "all miners". And that would clearly have been a nonsense because in many cases the advice to transfer out and claim the lump sum would have been perfectly appropriate. (Miners do, after all, have more severe health issues and somewhat shorter lifespans than most people. Come to that, so do Scottish people in general as a demographic. )

Either way, these chancers are going to have a fair bit of work to justify each individual pension claim. Not at all like the PPI claims, where the default assumption is that the policies should never have been allowed in the first place. (Because, IIRC, the PPI policies were protecting against debt contingencies, etc, which had already been covered by existing measures and were thus completely unnecessary.)

and then goes on to say 'Other Workers Affected' and lists Steel Workers, British Rail, BT, Civil Service, Dockers, Armed Forces, NHS, and as a catch all, adds Manufacturing and Services.

I shall be most interested to see whether any pension transfer claims can ever be made in respect of Civil Service, Armed Forces or NHS employees. To the best of my knowledge, none of those groups were ever eligible to transfer their pensions out ,because their retirements are paid for on a current and unfunded basis out of the national budget expenditure.

George Osborne did tinker for a while with the idea of letting the public sector transfer their pensions out, but eventually somebody reminded him that there was no separate pot of money for each public sector worker. Never had been, never would be! So it would seem that there won't be much there for the compensation cowboys to work on.

BJ

[Dod101]

BJ

I cannot help feeling in any case that there is a lot of hindsight going on here anyway, and your comments about the NHS etc just shows how poorly considered the ad is anyway. (And maybe the ignorance of the 'chancers' ).

Dod