If you have ever had a credit card, mortgage or personal loan with Yorkshire Bank from Dec 1989, up until 2013, there is a significant chance that you may have been mis-sold PPI.

The bank aggressively sold Payment Protection Insurance and Accident, Sickness and Unemployment Insurance on all their lending products. For mortgages, the cover was invariably through Aviva or one of its trading names. If the names, London & Edinburgh, General Accident, CGNU or Norwich Union mean anything to you, then you may well have been sold this type of protection. It was sold at a price per £100 of cover. For joint mortgages, the cover could be split between the mortgage holders.

For personal loans, we were able to quote to the FCA a particularly aggressive and shameful policy that the bank operated from circa 1999. Named “Scott Lane,” after a branch of the Yorkshire Bank where the scheme as first piloted, it involved the relentless targeting of personal loan customers, who in many cases, may have been only a few months into their loan repayments. Quotes for new borrowing were only supplied to include PPI, as the bank raked in a fortune of commission by selling premiums added to the borrowing from the outset.

Credit cards were constantly promoted by the bank, especially when new loans were sold. Credit card balances were often run up by customers and then switched to personal loan borrowing, but with customers allowed to retain their credit cards. It was a vicious circle. Sell a credit card with insurance, then that was more points towards the branch “sellers” target.

In April 2015, Clydesdale Bank as the parent of Yorkshire Bank was fined a then-record £20.70 million by the FCA for serious failings when handling complaints relating to mis-sold PPI. The bank had lied to customers and the Financial Ombudsman regarding their record keeping policy. Redress calculations on successful credit card claims were also incorrectly applied, with claims handlers not taking into account any PPI payable pre-2000.

This was the culmination of several years of work by Mike Begg and the team at Beat the Banks against Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank. Over that period, we engaged the help of a number of MP’s and the press, to bring the injustice against consumers into the public domain. Eventually, the FCA began their investigation, helped and assisted by the packaged case studies that we were able to provide, showing the true extent to which the bank were abusing the FCA PPI Dispute Appendix Rules. As a former senior manager within Clydesdale Bank Group, which includes Yorkshire Bank, Mike Begg, was also able to demonstrate and articulate to the FCA, the true record keeping practices employed by both banks.

Banks, in general, tend to hold computer personal loan records back to a certain point in time. For Clydesdale, although not necessarily the Yorkshire, in most cases, this was to the turn of the century. Beat the Banks were able to demonstrate that under the Data Protection Act 1998, the bank had retained and therefore were logically obliged to examine all “structured data.” Using this method many Clydesdale and Yorkshire customers now receive compensation for mis-sold PPI, back to December 1989, the very start of the then voluntary regulation of PPI.

The core of the Beat the Banks team and many of our claims experts were former lending managers within the Clydesdale Bank group. We are uniquely placed to help you recover mis-sold PPI sold by Yorkshire Bank. If you would like to know more please call our team on 01382 200474 or for free, on 0800 193 1234.