Have you ever thought what the figure £34.6 billion really means, other than it being the amount of money UK lenders have already paid out in PPI compensation
Come to that – have you ever thought what just £1 billion could buy you in various scenarios?
Just a 1 and 9 zeroes
Written down it’s just a 1 and 9 zeroes – £1,000,000,000 – but the reality is it could buy two brand new flagship hospitals or pay the annual salaries of 19,000 GPs.
Speaking of salaries, it would pay the annual wages of 27,000 secondary school teachers.
It might also buy 10 commercial spacecraft, five elite hotels or a very large chunk of your own Disneyland.
Personal level
On a more personal level, if you earn £16.50 an hour and work a 39 hour week you would have to work 60 million hours to earn £1 billion – that’s almost 7,000 years!
If you were to be given £1 every second you would have a million in two weeks, but to accumulate £1 billion at the same rate would take almost 32 years!
And all of that’s for just £1 billion – what would it look like multiplied by 34½ times?
Swamped
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently issued a statement advising that the banks had told them they were swamped with last minute claims before the PPI deadline on August 29th.
And delays to decisions were inevitable.
The lenders said the surge of new claims was so big it could take until Summer 2020 before they had all received a final decision
No change
The latest figure quoted of £34.6 billion paid in PP compensation since January 2011 has not been updated for two months and refers to claims paid out in July.
The total paid out for that month was £432.9 million – the biggest single monthly payout since March of 2016 and £92.6 million higher than the month before.
If payouts continue at the same level for the remainder of the year there will be another £2.16 billion to add to the grand total by December and still many more millions to follow in 2020.
Millions added
Britain’s lenders have added a staggering £5.3 billion to their redress reserves this year in the hope that it will be enough to pay compensation on the millions of claims still outstanding.
At least they hope it’s enough, but we won’t know the answer to that until summertime next year.
