6th September 2013

Protection from yourself

22nd August 2013: was this the day personal responsibility finally went out the window? It is reported that banks and credit card issuers are setting aside £1.3 billion as provision for compensation for the mis-selling of fraud and identity protection insurance.

Now I carry no torch for banks, and I agree that they probably are guilty of overselling on many, many occasions, but come on! do we really need to be protected from spending a couple of hundred quid on something we didn't really need? At that rate of going, I need to send the boys round to my fishing tackle shop and boat chandler, not to mention the local off licence and Virgin Wine Club.

And it's not as if nobody ever benefits from these things. My wife works for a bank and on more than one occasion people have complained about being mis-sold PPI even though they have claimed on the policy - and the bank paid out! How dumb is that?

We appear to be reversing Sir William Blackstone's long-held legal tenet that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

As many readers will know, a large proportion of my clients are people who have suffered serious personal injury; things like losing legs, brain damage, and the like. So I know a fair bit about what it means to be on the receiving end of a life-changing injury or medical negligence. I get really upset when people abuse the system and tar even deserving people with the same compensation culture brush. Sometimes, it isn't the other guy's fault; sometimes shi stuff just happens!

One final aside: those affected are to receive 8% interest on their winnings (sorry, compensation). How can this be when normal interest rates haven't risen above 3% for years? 

David Crozier CFP

Navigator Financial Planning Ltd

Panacea Comment, Regulation

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Comments (1)

David How very true. Many of us realise this to be the situation, brought about by an intrusive Nanny State and the continual dumbing down, where everyone is assumed to need protecting from themselves as they are all too stupid to take responsibility for their own actions. Take the banal instance of our Regulator insisting that percentages should not be used as they are not understood by the public. Perhaps the answer may lie in better education rather than in daft rules?

We live in a Compensation Culture which implies that when something goes awry it is invariably someone elses fault than your own. This of course is as a result of actions of the most effective lobby group the western world has ever seen the lawyers who are the big winners out of all of this to the detriment of practically everyone else.

Harry Katz   09/09/2013   10:25

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