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PPI: Britain's Biggest Banking Scandal

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25/03/2014

BBC Radio 4 - PPI: Britain's Biggest Banking Scandal

Michael Robinson investigates the continuing costs of the PPI mis-selling scandal.

Michael Robinson investigates the banks' continuing mis-selling scandal and the claims management industry, which has grown rich on the back of customers' compensation payouts.

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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