I live in Hampstead, the banker’s dormitory (Bankers told: join the real world on pay, 4 December). Here, all is well with the world, as they breathlessly anticipate their bonuses. The restaurants, bars and designer shops hum with international accents. The Filipino nannies walk the dogs, while the yummy mummies clog the streets with their 4×4s taking designer-togged toddlers to private prep schools. Little sign here of the devastation some of them have helped bring about in the lives of others; no sign at all of any remorse at having done so. How wonderful it would be to call their bluff and wave them off to France or Germany. It’s time to lance the boil. Any political party which doesn’t promise to wield the knife has no right to seek to represent the mass of the people of this country.

Alan Clark

London

• “Executives say losses in other parts of the bank … are separate to profits made by the investment bank.” Doesn’t this explode the myth that banks can’t be split up into “boring” retail banks and “casino” investment banks?

Alan Ball

Danbury, Essex

• A few weeks ago, a representative of the Association of British Insurers protested in a letter (28 August) about his industry being branded “socially useless”, as though it were a bank. You report now, though (Viewpoint, 4 December), that the ABI has come out in support of the RBS bonus plans. So perhaps there isn’t quite as much distance between the “socially useless” banks and the insurance industry.

Phil Back

Wetherby, West Yorkshire

• Very few people know what bankers do. Perhaps their publicity machine could put together “A Day in the Life…”. Then we, as part owners, might warm to them as they let us into what their long working days entail. Thank heavens teachers, nurses, police and other professions don’t hold the country to ransom for six-figure sums when they go about their normal duties of saving lives, educating the next generation, maintaining law and order etc.

Ken Wilbraham

Guildford, Surrey

• So there are no brilliant financiers who are happy to stay where they are, rather than go after even more obscene sums that they don’t really need. How sad is that?

Geoffrey Brace

Exeter

• I just hope none of these bankers who feel they are entitled to a huge bonus this Christmas will be calling for public spending cuts or pay freezes.

Janet Mansfield

Wigton, Cumbria

Financial Services Consumer Panel chairman calls on the FSA to impose personal fines on senior executives

Bank bosses should face personal fines if their companies are found to have mis-sold insurance policies, according to the head of one of the UK’s leading consumer-advocate bodies.

Adam Phillips, chairman of the Financial Services Consumer Panel (FSCP), said he wanted the most senior executives to be held to account by the Financial Services Authority.

He told the Observer: “I want to see more senior people, the heads of UK retail banking, sanctioned for mis-selling payment protection insurance [PPI]. At the moment the most senior person [to have been sanctioned] is the chief executive of Land of Leather.”

If his view prevails, then the chief executives of the retail divisions of major banks such as Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland could face fines if their companies are found to have mis-sold plans.

PPI is designed to cover loan repayments if a borrower falls ill or loses their job. Sales of the policies are believed to earn lenders around £4bn a year.

The Competition Commission had planned to ban the sale of such policies at the same time as a personal loan or credit card is taken out, making companies wait seven days before contacting customers to see if they wanted cover. The move, intended to make it easier for customers to shop around, was put on hold after it was challenged by Barclays.

Paul Briant, chief executive of Land of Leather, was fined £14,000 for failing to properly oversee the sale of PPI by his firm. The FSA found that the company had not ensured that all its sales force was fully trained to sell PPI over a six-month period in 2006 and that it had failed to make any effective check on its sales force until February 2007, exposing 58,000 customers to the risk of buying unsuitable plans. Land of Leather was also fined £210,000.

But when Alliance & Leicester was fined £7m for mis-selling PPI over the phone, none of the bank’s senior staff was penalised.

The Financial Ombudsman Service, which handles consumer complaints about numerous regulated products, has received fewer than 30 complaints of mis-selling from Land of Leather customers in the first six months of this year. In contrast, it has upheld nearly 3,500 complaints of PPI mis-selling against Lloyds during the same period, and another 2,000 against its subsidiaries Bank of Scotland and Black Horse Ltd, yet no individuals have been held responsible at these companies.

Other financial services companies that have had a high number of PPI mis-selling complaints upheld include Barclays, MBNA, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Welcome Financial Services.

Phillips said: “Banks are supposed to have systems to make sure they don’t have these failures. It’s clearly the case that there was a massive systems failure. Someone is responsible for making sure that doesn’t happen.”

A spokeswoman for the banking regulator, the Financial Services Authority, said it had taken the action it thought appropriate against firms where mis-selling had taken place. She said: “We’ve got complete commitment to taking action against individuals where there’s the evidence for us to take action.”

Phillips, who joined the FSCP in 2004 and took over as chairman in July, believes the next big mis-selling problems are likely to involve self-invested personal pensions and equity release products, which allow older people to realise cash from the value of their home.