London man wins time-barred compensation case
General Endowment News, Complaints and Compensation Claims, Monday, May 1st, 2006A London man has been awarded £1,500 in endowment compensation after a county court hearing, despite not having made his claim within the ‘time bar’ period after which endowment customers supposedly forfeit the right to any compensation.
The winner of the case, Vincent Cunningham, received a so-called ‘red letter’ from Friends Provident in 2000, which under the law gave him 3 years to make a claim. However, he argued that the letter wasn’t specific enough to fall under the regulations, as it made no mention of a time limit on claims, and didn’t inform him that his policy had been mis-seold and that he would likely suffer a loss.
The judge accepted his arguments, although a detailed transcript of his decision has yet to be released.
The verdict could open the compensation door for thousands of other policyholders who thought they had left it too late to make a claim, for even though county court verdicts don’t set a binding precedent on other judges, the verdict shows that positive results are possible.
It can be expected that new offers of no-win no-fee case handling will be made to endowment holders by complaint handling companies in light of the verdict.
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August 14th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
When all’s said and done about time-barring, how can anyone claim a loss which, until the policy runs its full course, is an UNQUANTIFIABLE loss???
Before you can say a policy was mis-sold as a way of paying off the capital sum of a mortgage advance in 20 or 25 years time, surely you have to wait until the full term of the policy to see??? The bonuses earned early on in the policy might have been smallish, to get better as time wore on. Instead, it has been the other way round, as history has proved. But, until that history has run its full course, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW!!!
Fred, from LEEDS.