How SSE issues mirror the PPI debacle

Find out the similarities between the payment protection insurance issues and the current SSE issues.

12:30 20 May 2013

One of the latest news stories brings up memories of Payment Protection Insurance and how customers felt pressured by banks to take insurance when it was optional, or how they may have ended up with a product that they actually didn’t even qualify to receive. SSE has been fined about £10million as a result of mis-selling.

 

How is this latest issue similar to the Payment Protection Insurance issue?

 

• Misrepresentation—just like the issues with Payment Protection Insurance, SSE customers were given the wrong idea about pricing of the services.

 

• Charges—the end result is that customers were charged incorrectly for the services that SSE provides.

 

• Widespread—though not as many people were affected by this most recent issue as were affected by the Payment Protection Insurance issue, there were still over 20,000 households that paid too much.

 

• Misselling—not only were customers told incorrect pricing at times, but it appears that customers in some cases weren’t told an amount until they had already signed over to the service.

 

• Expectations—like the Payment Protection Insurance issue, customers who thought they would receive a benefit to the service ended up without it. In certain cases with SSE customers found out that the monthly amount that was set wasn’t enough to cover their actual charges and would have left them in debt to SSE.

 

• Timeframe—the breach spanned between 1 and 3 years which is much shorter than the timeframe covered by the Payment Protection Insurance debacle, but is still a significant period of time.

 

The company has been fined, but there hasn’t been talk yet about whether or not customers of SSE will fill out forms similarly to customers of the Payment Protection Insurance or if existing bills will be credited for the amounts that customers overpaid. SSE has expressed its regret at the situation and hopefully a resolution will follow.