Jeff PrestridgeFeb 6 2019

My consumer champions

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My consumer champions
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In my time at the Mail on Sunday, there are three who spring readily to mind. Not all had success, but they still tried to move mountains in order to get a better consumer outcome and so deserve recognition.

Darren Cooke, chartered financial planner with Red Circle Financial Planning, is number one.

As I have said in previous Financial Adviser columns, he is the Braveheart who more than two years ago drew the government’s attention to the scourge of pension cold-calling.

Without his efforts, we would not have legislation in place to fine pension cold callers. Mr Cooke is a champion, plain and simple. He chivvied when others stood still.

Everyone thought the shared branch idea could work and save the High Street from decimation.

My second champion is Derek French, the individual who set up the Campaign for Community Banking Services in the late 1990s and ran it with distinction until its closure in 2016.

A former banker with NatWest, Mr French was convinced he had the answer to bank branch closures in the shape of the community bank. A branch whose running costs would be shared by all the big banks and be one of the pillars behind every community up and down the country.

For years, supported by funding from charities and small business groups, he lobbied furiously for the banks to get together and explore his shared branch idea.

From his home in Hertfordshire, he kept a meticulous database of branches that had been axed and the communities that had been turned into banking wastelands as a result of the banks reneging on commitments not to close the last branch in town.

I spent many a cold winter’s morning with him visiting communities where branches were closing. Everyone we met – be they bank customers, councillors, traders and even bank tellers – understood what Mr French was trying to achieve.

Everyone thought the shared branch idea could work and save the High Street from decimation.

He was desperate for the banks to agree to a piloting of the shared branch idea – a banking model successfully used in the US. But they would not play ball. Bar the occasional pyrrhic victory – where a bank branch closure was postponed or over-turned – he was thwarted.

All that he managed to get from lobbying government – primarily the coalition administration headed by David Cameron – was a requirement for the banks to carry out an impact assessment of any intended branch closure and to make this information publicly available. Nothing to halt the stream of closures.

Mr French said this ‘impact assessment’ has “few practical and sustainable benefits for customers and communities disadvantaged by closures and is probably regarded by the offending banks as merely an irritant to be suffered between announcing and implementing their irrevocable closure decisions”. 

Mr French was not successful in his campaign, but he did take on the banks almost single-handedly. For that alone, he will always be a consumer hero.

My final champion is Andrew Parr who died last month at the age of 74. Mr Parr was one of the linchpins behind a campaign in the early 2000s to protect the accrued pensions of workers whose employers had failed, leaving behind a pension scheme with insufficient assets to meet all its future obligations.

Mr Parr was such a victim, having lost his right to the works pension he had painstakingly accumulated when his employer (steel giant Allied Steel and Wire) folded.

Until Mr Parr and the Pensions Action Group that he helped form came on the scene, the protection afforded such pension victims (workers yet to take their company defined benefit pensions) was the square root of zero.

But by campaigning vigorously, he and other brilliant PAG members ensured everyone knew that there was a gaping black hole in pension protection that needed to be addressed.

They stripped at party conferences, they swam in the sea with banners aloft, and they attended all night vigils outside 10 Downing Street. They ruled nothing out in their quest for justice.

Thankfully, their magnificent – no-holds barred – campaigning bore fruit. With help from the likes of pensions expert Baroness Ros Altmann, understanding (former) MPs such as Derek Wyatt, and reams of copy written by personal finance journalists angered by the injustice done to these hard working people, government ministers realised urgent action was necessary.

The Pension Protection Fund was born; a vehicle that exists to this day paying compensation to people with a DB pension whose employer is no more. It now manages assets of some £30bn and makes payments to around a quarter of a million people. Quite something.

In my eyes, it is these kinds of people – the likes of Mr Cooke, Mr French and Mr Parr (and other PAG diehards) – that deserve all the gongs going.

They fought for consumer justice against the odds. They stood up for the little man and woman.

True consumer champions. True heroes intent on making the personal finance world a fairer and more just place – one we can be proud to be part of.

Jeff Prestridge is personal finance editor of the Mail on Sunday