Barclays has written to 10,000 customers with payment protection insurance to apologise after it failed to send them annual statements telling them how much they were spending on their policies and outlining their rights to cancel them.
In 2011, the Competition Commission ordered lenders to provide an annual account of their PPI following a two-year inquiry that found serious competition problems in the market.
Barclays said it had been contacted by a customer who had not received a statement and investigated the issue. Further investigations revealed that over the previous three statement periods a total of 9,404 Barclaycard customers had not been sent PPI statements and 740 customers with mortgage-related PPI were also affected.
It said the customers affected made up just under 3% of its PPI holders.
All have been sent apology letters explaining the error and offering to refund PPI premiums paid since the date of the first missing statement – as well as 8% interest – to those who cancelled their policy as a result.
The Competition and Markets Authority has written to Barclays about the breach of the order, requiring it to provide additional reporting on its controls to ensure that all such customers receive their statements in future.
Adam Land, the CMA’s senior director of remedies, said: “The annual statement was an important measure resulting from the market investigation which ensures customers know they have a PPI policy, how much they are spending on it and reminds them of their right to cancel or switch.”
He added: “Barclays has now taken the necessary steps to alert and recompense affected customers, as well as to ensure that there is no repeat in future. We trust that the extra reporting requirements we’ve put in place will confirm this.”
A Barclays spokesperson said the missing statements were the result of “a technical issue”.
“We have written to those customers to apologise and outline how we will remediate them where they believe they would have cancelled their policy, had they received the statements.
“We apologise unreservedly to those customers affected and have put in place a number of controls to prevent this from happening again.”
