Barclays won't refund PPI as they can't find policy details!

candykisses

A couple of months ago, when I was checking my mums online banking, I noticed there was a payment of £2.40 for o/d protection. I asked her about it and she said she has paid it for years, she thinks at least twelve years.

I know it's only £2.40 per month, but still a fair bit of money to reclaim. She thought it was just normal bank charges.

She's 66 (widowed at 40) and hasn't worked since that age, so there is no income to protect as she only gets a Widows State Pension.

I applied using the Money Saving Expert form and things were OK until we received this letter today:

" Dear Mrs S

Thank you for your letter regarding the sale of Payment Protection Insurance on your Additions Plus Personal Overdraft.

We are sorry you have had to contact us about the sale of your Payment Protection Insurance policy (PPI). Thank you for taking the time and trouble to do so.

We have completed our investigation and unfortunately due to the length of time since you commenced your insurance cover which was before Barclays became a member of the General Insurance Standards Council on 20 November 2001, we have been unable to retrieve any details of PPI charges made to your account. As a result your complaint cannot be upheld.

However, if you are able to provide us with any further information relating to this policy, for example, the policy number of a copy of the policy document, your complaint will be re-opened and our investigation will progress."

My mum can't find any paperwork for it so we don't know what policy number it is, so looks like she has lost this money now. Feel bad for getting her hopes up.

All it says on the bank statement is "Overdraft Protection (Service Charges) £2.40 and more recently "Payment Protection £2.40". She has all the original bank statements dating back to 2003.

Seems unfair that the fat cats get the cream whilst the vunerable always end up left high and dry.

Any ideas anyone? x

candykisses

Also, how can she cancel the payment as it's not an actual direct debit, it just shows as service charges. Went online to see if I could see a reference number for it but as its not a dd or sto I can't cancel it. Grrrrrr. :mad:

prowla

If you have the monthly statements with the charge on it, then that should be proof enough.
"Overdraft Protection" and "Payment Protection" seem pretty plain English and proof to me!

candykisses

thanks prowla, I thought the same, she gets a weekly statement though, so that would mean photcopying quite a lot of statements, am a bit loathe to send originals to them.

sorryitsme

Ring 0500 500 700 (Barclays Insurance Dublin) and they should be able to tell her the policy numbers and any PPI she has ever had (loans, credit cards etc).

My complaint was upheld and started from 1998 so they can go back that far.

Also get copy statements for proof if they cannot help.

My sister got a knock back from Barclays yesterday with them quoting the same clause, I rang the FOS and they said of late Barclays have been saying this to pre 2001 complaints, but the FOS will still look at it.

Good Luck!

amersall

candykisses wrote: »

A couple of months ago, when I was checking my mums online banking, I noticed there was a payment of £2.40 for o/d protection. I asked her about it and she said she has paid it for years, she thinks at least twelve years.

I know it's only £2.40 per month, but still a fair bit of money to reclaim. She thought it was just normal bank charges.

She's 66 (widowed at 40) and hasn't worked since that age, so there is no income to protect as she only gets a Widows State Pension.

I applied using the Money Saving Expert form and things were OK until we received this letter today:

" Dear Mrs S

Thank you for your letter regarding the sale of Payment Protection Insurance on your Additions Plus Personal Overdraft.

We are sorry you have had to contact us about the sale of your Payment Protection Insurance policy (PPI). Thank you for taking the time and trouble to do so.

We have completed our investigation and unfortunately due to the length of time since you commenced your insurance cover which was before Barclays became a member of the General Insurance Standards Council on 20 November 2001, we have been unable to retrieve any details of PPI charges made to your account. As a result your complaint cannot be upheld.

However, if you are able to provide us with any further information relating to this policy, for example, the policy number of a copy of the policy document, your complaint will be re-opened and our investigation will progress."

My mum can't find any paperwork for it so we don't know what policy number it is, so looks like she has lost this money now. Feel bad for getting her hopes up.

All it says on the bank statement is "Overdraft Protection (Service Charges) £2.40 and more recently "Payment Protection £2.40". She has all the original bank statements dating back to 2003.

Seems unfair that the fat cats get the cream whilst the vunerable always end up left high and dry.

Any ideas anyone? x

Give FOS ring and ask what you should do,if they cannot help you they may let you know what you can do.
http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/contact/index.html

And what sorryitsme said!!.

amersall

candykisses wrote: »

Also, how can she cancel the payment as it's not an actual direct debit, it just shows as service charges. Went online to see if I could see a reference number for it but as its not a dd or sto I can't cancel it. Grrrrrr. :mad:

Ring Barclays and ask for this to be cancelled.

candykisses

Thank you for your replies - I will get my mum to ring that number and try to obtain a policy number.

I know it may seem like peanuts to Barclays but if my mum could get six years back, that would be £150 to go and treat herself with.

Looks like they just want you to read their letter and give up. She said she would have just left it if I didn't have access to forums like these - makes you wonder how many other "technology-less pensioners" have been ripped off!:(

2sides2everystory

Barclays have some explaining to do. Whoever wrote that letter needs a good talking to because they are not complying with the commitment made by Barclays published on their own website to settle all PPI complaint cases quickly.

AFAIK, no policy was ever issued to the customer with Barclays Overdraft PPI per se - it was merely a section of small print within a general terms and conditions booklet that your Mum was handed if the person that sold it to her was acting correctly (as we now know, many habitually didn't and such excuses as 'the branch has run out of booklets' were I think commonplace). I have been a Barclays customer on and off for yonks and have seen it all. And IIRC any such booklet never contained a policy number. Even if it did, the policy number would only be that of a master policy covering all their Overdfraft PPI customers and was not in any way unique to your mother.

You and your mother are being fobbed off and Barclays should be ashamed.

It appears (Click on the 'Cost Of Cover' tab) that they have attempted to throw customers further off the scent by labelling the link to the latest version of the Policy Document online as merely "guide to insurance" but the link does give the current policy document. It is faintly ridiculous:

(a) For anything called a policy document in insurance not to have a number and
(b) Having found ourselves in the situation described in (a) to have the people selling it insist on you providing the number before they will entertain a claim further.

I particularly find this paragraph distasteful and evidence of the ignorance of the erk that penned it: "We have completed our investigation and unfortunately due to the length of time since you commenced your insurance cover which was before Barclays became a member of the General Insurance Standards Council on 20 November 2001, we have been unable to retrieve any details of PPI charges made to your account. As a result your complaint cannot be upheld."

My reaction is "What's GISC got to do with the price of eggs?" Barclays was apparently the first bank to become regulated by GISC to sell general insurance. If you think FSA has been a damp squib, then GISC as an insurance regulator was a complete non-event but I see they actually clung on until 2007. That was coincidentally (?) when the current online policy document from Barclays was last updated (8/2007). But back to the point - well there is no point in that sentence about GISC that they put in the letter. It's a nonsense. So what if Barclays changed regulator after they sold your Mum [STRIKE]a pup[/STRIKE] PPI ? Was the first rule of GISC 'Dump all your records of existing insurance contracts and forget how you sold anything before you joined GISC - basically you can pretend it didn't happen' ??

It is disgraceful that Barclays have not retained full records of an insurance contract that has evidently been continuous for any real length of time at all. 10 years is nothing in insurance terms, especially since the nineties when computer storage of data became very cheap, and in the noughties even scanning everything became cheap.

When I worked for a major insurer in the seventies, we had copy paper documents going back to between the World Wars for those customers who had been so loyal as to retain insurances with us. And when they were converted to computer records (again in the 70s), the paper was not entirely done away with and the computer records were double-checked to be good and complimentary. That was 25 years before Barclays are suggesting they've lost the records.

These people are trying to pull the wool suggesting that 10 years is a long time for them to bother to keep records of an existing insurance? And in fact we know that there was never any unique document in your mother's name, merely the charge that appears continuously every month on her bank statement and no doubt whatsoever still shows on their central computer records as going back to the year dot. £2.40 at the last published rate of premium suggests an overdraft limit of £300. Right? They know it. They know how exactly how it evolved over all these years because it is just one fixed wording master contract. It is one of the simplest insurances they sold in the branches to trace because it appears on the heading of the account as a "Protected" Overdraft and it shows on the account as a separate charge every month. It is charged at 80p per hundred of overdraft.

Furthermore they know your mother isn't happy she was sold it correctly (she didn't even know what it was) and they know that sending you a letter like they have done is quite likely to put off from pursuing the matter a large proportion of PPI claimants like you who apparently, despite Barclays published commitment, have to tolerate receiving such nonsense. Tell them to go swivel on it. Or better: get the FOS to do it.

Don't spend too much time trying to get a policy number for this complaints department shower. It means sod all. I'd say they deserve for you to complain immediately to FOS and let Barclays incur the £550 or so immediate extra cost of explaining themselves and their dumb letter to FOS.

Makes my blood boil reading stuff like this :mad:

candykisses

thank you so much, that really has made me feel better and more optimistic. really appreciate the time you took to post. I will let you know how we get on.

Placida

I am awaiting a decision on my OD protection from Barclays due in the next 2 weeks. I was feeling quite hopeful!
I used same reasons as I did for mis sale of ppi on a couple of loans I had had with them. I had an offer on those fairly quickly but asked them to recalculate as they were part of a chain of loans.

I phoned recently to ask when I would hear and was told I had to go back to end of queue for recalculations! Not happy was an understatement.
Was also told couldn’t really give me date when I would hear decision about OD protection as there were" only a few of them dealing with thousands of complaints!!" :mad:

Beggars belief considering Barclays state “We are focused on ensuring we process all our PPI complaints as quickly as possible, in the best interests of our customers.”