After spending Christmas
alone in her flat last year
because of the Covid rules
Emily Regan, an A&E nurse,
is hoping that this time she
will get to visit her aunts in
Dorset. That’s if she can get
there.
She can’t rely on trains or
coaches unless she can get
a lift part of the way, and
she is struggling to find any
hire cars that are not
extortionately expensive.
Car hire prices are soaring.
Demand is twice as high as
last year, when a sudden
lockdown meant that no one
could travel, and the supply
of new vehicles has been hit
by a global shortage of the
semi-conductor electronic
chips used in many devices
and all modern cars. In some
areas rental costs have
tripled.
Regan, who moved to
Balham, south London, five
years ago from Perth in
Western Australia, said: “I
didn’t really see anyone last
year. Some of my friends
dropped off leftover food, soKate PalmerNurse Emily
Regan had to
spend Christmas
alone last year£1,200 for a
week’s car hire?
Just borrow
one instead...
I sent them a selfie of myself
by the Christmas tree, with a
Christmas hat and a G&T.”
She decided to try a car
share service, renting
through Hiyacar, which
allows vehicle owners to rent
directly to vetted drivers and
sorts out the insurance. The
cars may not be brand new or
pristine, and if anything goes
wrong there isn’t a person at
a rental desk to speak to, but
the app has a chat function.
It cost Regan just over
£160 to rent a Mini for three
days over Christmas, which
she says is half of what she
would have had to pay a big
car hire company.
We checked some other
prices to see how much extra
drivers are having to pay over
the holidays. To hire a
Fiat 500 from Europcar in
Kennington, south London,
from December 23-30 cost
£1,237 but the price fell to
£421 for January 23-30.
It cost £39.99 a day to
hire a Skoda Octavia from
Sixt in Cambridge from
January 24-29, but £128.66
a day for December 24-29,
with fewer cars to choose
from. The cheapest model,
a Peugeot 208 at £32 a day,
was not available in late
December.
A Ford Transit van hired
from Hertz in Bolton from
December 24-26 was £150,
but £40 less for the same
dates in January. In Cardiff,
the cheapest three-day hire
in January was £83 for a
Volkswagen Golf from
EconomyBookings from
January 24-26, compared
with £210 for a Peugeot 208
from Green Motion whenbooked through Opodo for
December 24-26.
Rent-a-Car, part of the
Volkswagen finance group,
said bookings in November
were up 144 per cent
compared with last year, and
it was expecting Christmas to
be its busiest ever.
Mark Forton from
Volkswagen said: “People
who have no vehicle of their
own or who run smaller cars
year-round are hiring larger,
more reliable vehicles to visit
friends and family for a
Christmas that will hopefully
be very different from last
year’s muted season.”
Virtuo, a contactless car
rental company based in
London, said that half of its
fleet was booked out weeks
before Christmas.
Kendall car hire in the
southeast has a pop-up
warning on its website saying
that cars are fully booked
online for Christmas and
advising customers to ring
local branches.
Hiyacar says that it has
had a 53 per cent increase in
Christmas bookings
compared with last year.
Other car-sharing sites,
such as Turo, KarShare and
Getaround, allow you to book
a car, unlock it with your
phone and return it to the
same spot. You normally have
to provide a scan of your
driving licence and answer
some security questions. Car
owners will review your
profile before approving you.
These firms do not arrange
insurance for you, and you
will be liable for any damage
and if you do not fill a car up
before returning it.financial product actively targets
younger people in a way that has never
happened before, which is what
regulators need to look at.
The same goes for fraud. We can’t just
expect banks to compensate everyone
who loses money, but at the same time
we can’t allow them to wash their hands
of those who need protecting.
Banks actually want to encourage
personal responsibility; the problem is
that their own infantile behaviour in not
following the fraud repayment rules has
forced regulators to get tough on them.
The end result of this is that banks treat
us like children who can’t be trusted not
to fall for fraudsters.
And then there is what is happening
in the mortgage market. Increasingly the
only way for young people to get on the
property ladder is by moving back in
with their parents, getting a handout or
having them guarantee the mortgage. At
every point on a young person’s journey
to independence we expect them to go
running back to Mum and Dad.
I’ve long been a believer that it is
pointless teaching financial education
in schools — you need to reach parents
first because that is who young people
learn from. Get parents to start good
habits — save more, shop better and talk
about the value of money — and the
children will follow.
We can’t expect young people to have
better financial habits if we don’t
demonstrate them ourselves. And
Christmas is a good time to start.I
hate the Elf on the Shelf, this new
thing (I refuse to use the word
tradition) where you put a toy elf
somewhere in your house to see if
you have been naughty or nice.
Bah humbug.
I really don’t like the word “Crimbo”
and shudder every time someone says
there are “only five more sleeps until
Santa comes”. Keep your special holly
and reindeer jim-jams, particularly if
they are monogrammed. Why does
everything need to have your initial on it
these days? You’re not a Premier League
footballer.
And no, sorry, your Christmas jumper
is not hilarious. Good grief, you’re an
adult, grow up. Bah humbug.
I love Christmas, but it does bring out
the worst in us, particularly when it
comes to spending and personal
responsibility.
The constant infantilisation that some
indulge in is actually very harmful when
it comes to the way we manage our
finances, and the expectations that we
place on younger generations. We have a
voracious consumer society, which has
been the driving force for much of our
growth for the past 40 years. We are
under constant pressure to buy more,
have the latest gadget or fashion.
My current guilty pleasure is the BBC
TV show Sort Your Life Out, in which the
presenter Stacey Solomon helps families
whose homes are overflowing. She
empties their belongings in to a giant
warehouse and they are challenged tothrow half of it away. There are
mountains of shoes, video games
consoles, phones, clothes (oh, the piles
of clothes), and the anguish of recycling,
selling or donating it is a viewing delight.
One of the things the pandemic has
taught us is that living a happy life is not
expensive — you need your health, your
family, open space and loo roll. It was
actually quite heartening.
Credit card companies have been
driving us to spend more for decades;
those Rowan Atkinson Barclaycard
adverts from the 1990s totally trivialised
spending. For years they also offered
football shirts, cashback, vouchers,
loyalty points if you spent a certain
amount in the first few weeks. Store
cards sold at the till in department stores
were particularly toxic because they
actively encouraged you to open one to
get money off there and then.
This cuts to the heart of what we’ve
come to call the Klarna problem, named
after the Swedish fintech buy now, pay
later credit firm. On a BBC Panorama
exposé last Monday they interviewed a
man who had bought five jackets in the
past few weeks and was talking about
how easy it was to get buy now, pay later
credit. There was also a woman who just
couldn’t stop spending.
We trivialise them by dubbing them
shopaholics when actually they are
probably addicts spurred on by society
and social media expectations; yet we
blame a financial product that is free.
There is an issue in that this freeNo more Crimbo jimjams,
it’s time we all grew up
James Coney
MONEY
Follow us on Twitter @ST_Money
MY WOEFUL TIME
ON THE MARKETS
IAN COWIE,
PAGE 15
WHY IS IT SO HARD
TO GIVE AWAY
A FORTUNE?
PAGE 14
THE SNOWMAN COMPOSER
ON WHY HE LOVES DECEMBER
FAME AND FORTUNE, PAGE 18
“Just six days before we were due there,
our much-loved dog was diagnosed with
serious heart problems and as we were
not able to take him away we had to
cancel. The terms were that cancellation
so late would mean foregoing our
money, so we were astonished by the
sympathetic treatment we had, getting
a full return of our money within three
days. In the light of so many stories of
firms not returning money — even when
Covid-19 caused cancellations — I felt this
was truly outstanding.”
Another reader had booked tickets to
the 2020 Banff Mountain Film Festival at
the Union Chapel in north London. This
was postponed twice, but rescheduled
for October 18 this year. The reader
said: “We have a vulnerable premature
grandson and elderly parents and felt
uncomfortable about being in a busy
indoor venue. So I approached Snowline
Media. Lauren from Snowline was
completely understanding and did not
hesitate to give us our money back.”
Nationwide Building Society earned
the praise of a reader after it protected
her from fraud. “Nationwide had its red
flags and klaxons operational shortly
before I decided I had been scammed,”
she said. “I got through quickly to its
telephone helpline to find it had already
blocked my account, pulled back theA
s we learn to live with
Covid, I am hoping that we
will not have to put up with
appalling customer service
permanently. Since the
pandemic arrived I have
been inundated with
complaints (more than
3,000 emails and letters
this year) about the
terrible behaviour of retailers, airlines,
utilities, financial companies and
government departments.
I have claimed more than £2.5 million
for readers. This includes compensation
for poor (often atrocious) service,
refunds, mortgages and other types of
credit that had previously been refused
to readers, and savings.
It’s a huge amount, representing
situations that left readers feeling
frustrated, worried, angry and, in
some of the worst cases of fraud,
guilty and ashamed.The villains
Repeat offenders include Ryanair,
which outraged readers when its chief
executive, Michael O’Leary, claimed that
all customers who wanted a refund got
one. You wrote in droves to say that this
simply wasn’t true and it soon became
apparent that although the airline had
sent an email providing details of how
to claim a refund, the relevant link was
hidden towards the bottom and many
customers had missed it.
Even when they did apply, refunds
were refused to some who seemed to
have perfectly valid claims, including a
head teacher locked down in Leicester at
the time of her planned flight and a man
who was forced to cancel flights because
he had urgent cancer tests.QUESTION
OF MONEY
JILL INSLEY
ON
EY
LEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
As fraudsters made hay
from the Covid chaos
and banks and airlines
left us all stranded, our
consumer champion
went into battleEnergy companies have also caused
more than their fair share of stress. The
collapse of several smaller firms and the
subsequent transfer of their customers
to stronger, bigger suppliers caused
a flood of complaints about failure to
communicate, slowness in setting up
new accounts, lack of access to credit
balances and customers being prevented
from switching.
One company told me that delays
were inevitable, given that the customer
records of collapsing suppliers are
generally in a mess. The message is to be
patient and with more companies likely
to collapse, now’s not the time to switch.
Government departments have also
struggled in the pandemic, particularly
HMRC and the Department for Work
and Pensions. The Sunday Times has had
dozens of complaints about incorrect
tax demands and penalties, and I would
like to thank Dan Allen at HMRC who
helped so much to resolve them. In
contrast the DWP has done very little to
rectify the distress it has caused. It fell
months behind in notifying spouses
about their ability to apply for
bereavement support payments. One
reader whose husband, a policeman
who had been retired only a few days,
died after falling and breaking his neck
in the garden, was told five days after
the anniversary of his death that she
might be entitled to the payment. She
contacted the DWP straight away only to
be told that there was a 12-month time
limit on claims for the lump sum, which
would have been £2,500 in her case.
The DWP has referred her and other
readers to the Social Security and Child
Support tribunal. She has yet to be given
a date for the hearing and another
reader had his claim rejected.
I find it staggering that a government
department can refuse these payments
on the grounds that they were applied
for too late when the department was
itself responsible for the delay. And it is
cruel beyond belief that those who have
lost spouses are being forced to go to a
tribunal to fight for money that would
already be theirs if the DWP had done
its job properly. The policeman’s widow
said: “It has all been very distressing to
have to fight this battle when I am trying
to cope with my grief.”The heroes
It hasn’t all been bad though: I have
had several emails praising companies
this year. One reader had to cancel
her holiday in a Rumsey cottage in
Sandbanks, Dorset, in June. She said:The year I won £2.5m for readers
convincing and reassuring. Fraudsters
are brilliant at engendering confidence
or fear — whichever emotion suits
their purpose. They are also skilled at
selecting the most vulnerable victims,
who are easier to persuade. These often
suffer long-term illness, are elderly,
looking after ailing partners or suffering
from dementia. The scammers are
completely ruthless.
One reader told me that his 84-year-
old father was scammed out of £100,000
while he was dying of cancer. His family
realised he had been ensnared only
when the fraudsters rang him during
a chemotherapy treatment and his
daughter answered his mobile. This
means it is more important than ever
that families support their older
relatives, setting up call screening and
ideally lasting power of attorney so they
can help with their finances.Protect yourself
The Payment Systems Regulator
is consulting on how to improve
scam prevention and increase the
reimbursement of victims, but it is still
crucial to be suspicious of all unsolicited
calls, texts and emails. Do not hand
money over to investment companies
you find advertising on Facebook or
other social media, or which you find
through search engines such as Google —
the controls over advertisers are simply
not tight enough to be confident that
they are genuine.
If you want to invest, use an
independent financial adviser
as an intermediary, or at the very least
make sure you are dealing with a
legitimate firm by checking the Financial
Conduct Authority register.
Your bank will never call to tell you
that your account has been hacked
and that you should move money into
another one that it has conveniently set
up for you. Likewise, HMRC will not ring
to say you will be arrested if you don’t
pay a tax bill and courier companies
will not text you to say you owe a small
amount of extra postage that must be
paid before a parcel can be delivered. If
any of these things happen, you can be
sure that there is a fraudster trying to
pull your strings.
If things do go wrong and you can’t
sort the problem out yourself, please
remember I am here to help. No matter
how impossibly big or embarrassingly
small the issue may seem, Question of
Money is ready to step in.
Be careful, stay safe and make 2022
the year to send fraudsters packing.CAN WE
HELP YOU?
Email your
questions to
Jill Insley at
questionof
money@sunday-
times.co.uk
or write to
Question of
Money, The
Sunday Times,
1 London Bridge
Street, London
SE1 9GF.
Please send
copies of
original
documents.
Letters should
be exclusive
to The Sunday
Times. Advice
is offered
without legal
responsibility.
We regret Jill
cannot reply to
everyone who
contacts her.suspicious credit card payments,
dragged back the second current
account transfer and was chasing the
first. Later that afternoon it credited
back the first transfer. So I want to give
a big round of applause to Nationwide
since I know some financial firms are far
from helpful in these circumstances.”
She is right. Banks often fail to spot
frauds as they are happening, and
although the biggest have signed up to
the contingent reimbursement model
code, a voluntary agreement that sets
out how banks should treat victims of
push payment fraud, many people are
not compensated because their bank
blames them for the loss, or the money
has been sent to a foreign bank account
so is not eligible for a refund.
I have taken up several cases where
I feel the banks involved have failed to
protect victims and were therefore
wrong not to refund them, and these
are by far the biggest contributor to
the £2.5 million total refund.
But I can’t take on all cases nor win
all those I do, so it is vital that readers
do everything they can to protect
themselves from fraudsters.
These criminals are completely
different from the illiterate email-
senders of a decade ago. Their emails
and letters are flawless, and their callsForcing
grieving
families
into a
tribunal
is cruel