While complaints are still being upheld PPI remains a live scandal

Outlook: The banks are still – still – failing to deal with the issue properly, years after it first emerged

PPI is the biggest source of complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service (Getty)

It is a racing certainty that the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposed time bar of spring 2018 for new complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI) policies will be adopted. Banks claim that they need it because this grubby affair has been dragging on, fuelled by opportunistic and unscrupulous complaints-handling firms. “Maybe the banks have a point: let’s have done with this,” would be an understandable reaction from those plagued by unwanted calls. But should banks be let off the hook? A cursory glance at figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) that will be released today suggests otherwise.

PPI is still by far the biggest source of complaints to the FOS, and more than two-thirds (70 per cent) are being upheld. That makes it an outlier. The FOS divides its cases into 86 separate categories, publishing data on each of those that generate 30 or more complaints. Figures for the financial year to date show that in only three other categories are complaints upheld at a rate of 60 per pent and above.

Now, a customer can only approach the FOS after first exhausting a financial institution’s own complaints procedure, at which time it says it acts as an impartial arbiter, approaching cases with an “open mind” and dealing with them on the basis of the facts it sees. The figures bear that out.

The fact that PPI is such an outlier when it comes to the proportion of cases upheld therefore strongly suggests that the banks are still – still – failing to deal with the issue properly, years after it first emerged. And it puts their gripes about vexatious complaints and claims-handling companies into perspective.

We should only talk about complaints time bars when the proportion upheld by the ombudsman is cut to something below 50 per cent. Unfortunately, Government pressure appears to be forcing the FCA to abandon the even-handedness that the FOS is demonstrating in favour of going soft. So the banks will likely get their way.

Adidas – celebrating sport and moral ambiguity

In the wake of the transatlantic bust-up over the Iraq War, this is how President George W Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, summed up American foreign policy: “Punish France. Ignore Germany. Forgive Russia.”

If you’ll forgive the allusion, given that sports sponsorship is of considerably less importance, it offers a good model to explain the recent behaviour of Adidas towards its partners. If you replace “ignore” with “criticise” you get punish the IAAF, criticise Manchester United, forgive Fifa.

First the IAAF: the BBC has reported that Adidas wants to punish athletics’ governing body by withdrawing its sponsorship as a result of recent doping scandals. Critics have pointed out that apparent moral outrage has done nothing to stop Adidas from retaining its ties with Fifa’s World Cup, despite the corruption scandal in which Fifa is mired. Athletics is a minor sport, which really impinges on the world’s consciousness only during the Olympics. Adidas therefore has little to lose by dumping it.

Fifa’s World Cup is very different beast. The finals are a global obsession. Adidas bosses know that billions of football fans won’t give a fig for the alleged misdeeds of the governing body once it gets under way. Hence forgive Fifa.

As for “criticise Manchester United” as Adidas chief executive Herbert Hainer did by complaining the team’s style of play was “not what we wanted to see”? He’s only repeating what lots of fans have already said. They’ll probably cheer him on. With Adidas having poured £750m into the club’s coffers, its executives will put up with his grousing. So there you have the Adidas sponsorship doctrine. Cynical? Certainly. Hypocritical? Yep. But the commercial logic is obvious.

Diversity at the top? It’s still not happening

I have been a consistent critic of British companies’ record on diversity in this column. While there have been improvements in gender diversity in the wake of efforts by Lord Davies, they’ve been slow in coming and his targets – such as 25 per cent of directors being female by last year – are hardly ambitious.

The majority of new female directors have been appointed to non-executive roles. Research by the think-tank New Financial brings that point home – but with a twist. Across Europe, it found that where women do sit on executive committees, they tend to be in support roles rather than as the heads of frontline profit centres.

It’s not that uncommon to find that multinationals’ heads of HR or PR are women. The bosses of America or EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa)? They’re almost always male. Ditto country heads below them.

If you wanted to be really cynical you might wonder whether these roles have been pigeonholed as somehow suitable to be given to women by some of the more antediluvian organisations.

The think-tank says that change is taking place. But it would like it to be quicker. There’s certainly a carrot for those firms which take Lord Davies’s recommendations on board: it’s good PR and it keeps investors sweet. But In the UK, at least, there isn’t any real stick. So hopes that necessary change will be quicker and more substantive will most likely end up being dashed.