Lloyds Bank charged Mavis £1,000 for an account with perks she could never use
She can’t drive, rarely travels and owns a £10 mobile phone
MAVIS TAYLOR lives alone in sheltered housing. She can’t drive, rarely goes on holiday and when she needs to make a phone call, uses a cheap, pay-as-you-go mobile.
The former home help is 80 and has a small pension that barely covers life’s essentials.
yet over the past eight years, the pensioner from oldham has paid around £1,000 in fees to lloyds for a current account that gives her a car breakdown policy, worldwide travel insurance and mobile phone cover — perks that she could never have used.
To most ordinary people, this would seem to be a clear case of mis-selling — but not to lloyds.
one of Britain’s biggest banks, lloyds has rejected her complaint and says it was right to sell this packaged account — which costs £12.95 a month — to an elderly woman who couldn’t use any of the benefits.
Mavis is just one of around nine million people who have been sold packaged accounts by banks in the past decade. Fees range from £6 to £25 a month.
But today, like Mavis, tens of thousands of customers are trying to recover the charges, claiming they should never have been sold the accounts in the first place.
Many of these people could never have used the perks and did not understand for what they were being charged.
last week, the independent Financial ombudsman Service revealed that it had received 29,030 inquiries about packaged accounts between April and September — almost as many as in the whole of last year.
Mavis doesn’t clearly remember being signed up for the lloyds Gold current account.
Nor does she recall anyone from lloyds, where she has been a customer since 1969, running through the account’s terms and conditions.
She knew she had to pay a fee, but believed it was a compulsory charge to have a debit card. It was never clear to her that she was paying for an account that was optional when she could have had one more suited to her needs — with no benefits, but also no additional charges.
Mavis only queried the fees she was paying this summer after her younger brother, David oakes, 66, who works as a director at a building society, started to help her manage her affairs.
‘ It is totally unreasonable to expect people in their 70s and 80s to understand what they are being told when put under the pressure of the hard sell from sales people interested in earning commission,’ says David.
‘I am convinced the bank did not check whether the account was suitable for Mavis before signing her up.’ The Gold account that Mavis has today is no longer on sale to new customers.
It includes worldwide travel insurance underwritten by insurer Axa, which covers travellers under the age of 80.
But as Mavis suffers from a host of conditions, including diabetes, asthma and high blood pressure, she is likely to have been excluded from the cover. She paid extra for specialist cover for a recent trip to the Channel Islands.
The account also has gadget insurance that covers lost and stolen mobiles up to a maximum of £2,000. But Mavis’s phone is worth no more than £10. AA breakdown cover was also included with the account, even though Mavis hasn’t been behind the wheel of a car since she failed her driving test in 1962. With the help of David, Mavis wrote to lloyds to complain.
But the bank threw out the complaint, saying it was not possible for its staff to ‘explain all the policy exclusions and eventualities for the insurance products’. It said that Mavis, who for the past decade has suffered from sight problems as a result of her diabetes, should have read the welcome pack that was posted to her as that explained all the exclusions.
And it said that in 2009, Mavis phoned Axa to find out if she was covered by her travel insurance for a trip she was going to take to Portugal.
lloyds temporarily stopped selling packaged accounts in branches and over the phone in January 2013.
At the time, a whistleblower told the Mail there were fears the accounts were being mis-sold. This is something that the bank has always denied.
In August, Money Mail revealed that Britain’s biggest banks had set aside £ 825 million to cover claims for mis- sold packaged accounts. lloyds has put aside £ 175 million, RBS £ 400 million and Barclays £250 million.
‘It’s not enough for lloyds to say that if someone has ticked a box on a form that they agree with everything and understand all that is said to them,’ says Marc Gander, co-founder of campaign organisation the Consumer Action Group.
‘ It seems to me that is not taking account of someone’s vulnerability, and in this case the bank seems to have exploited an old lady’s trust.’
A lloyds Bank spokesman says that when Mavis opened the account, it was recorded that she wanted travel insurance. ‘We’re aware of Mrs Taylor’s case, which is with the Financial ombudsman, and as a result we are unable to comment at this time,’ he adds.