JESSICA BEARD: Scottish Widows fails the people it named itself after

What a painful irony it is to see Scottish Widows disappoint the very people they so proudly took their name from in the early 1800s.

I am surprised by how poorly the insurer has treated dozens of loyal customers in their hour of need.

And the cases reported to Money Mail are just the tip of a mountainous backlog of families left waiting for Scottish Widows – 6,000 in all at the start of the year.

Readers have told us about the struggle to claim money after the death of a loved one. Many are in tears on the phone. How the Scottish Widows grief teams could treat them so coldly is beyond me.

Companies are desperately pushing us online, but that’s no excuse to forget how important it is to add a human touch when it’s needed most.

Short call handlers and thoughtless letters have rubbed salt in the wounds inflicted by long waits and delays of up to nine months to receive insurance and retirement benefits.

It has taken weeks of requests from Money Mail for Scottish Widows to bring forward a senior executive to explain what went wrong.

Finally, Donald MacKechnie addressed me and coughed up an apology. He sounded genuinely sorry. And quite rightly so

The group has hired more staff and promised to work through the long list of waiting families and pay compensation plus interest.

In fact, they’ve handled 1,300 cases in the past four weeks alone. It’s a good start. But I’m afraid Scottish Widows has done permanent damage to its venerable old brand.

Certainly, in the eyes of the customers it has let down, there is no going back. Now the rest of the country can read how heartlessly Scottish Widows have behaved as well.

Premiums greed

Complaints to Money Mail about increases in insurance renewals continue to pile up.

Emails and letters have been pouring in from those who have seen auto and home coverage quotes, more than double in some cases – as our Premium League report shows today. Insurers often can’t explain what drove the price up and simply hide behind the cloak of high headline inflation rates.

Inflation on the consumer price index is at 10.5 percent, but many of the insurance premium increases you reported to Money Mail go well beyond this.

The vast majority are being asked to cough up an extra 40 to 50 percent on what they paid last year.

It’s almost as if the insurance giants just expect customers to view these astonishing increases as another blow to the cost of living and shrug. No, what this really comes down to is greed.

What’s worse is that most of the biggest premium increases have been requested from the elderly. Insurers have found easy targets in vulnerable households that don’t have access to the internet and can’t find the cheapest deals.

Insurers are trying to make more money to boost their balance sheets by treating us like cash cows that they can swindle at will. And again, the regulator sleeps behind the wheel.

Free the money!

Hundreds of ATMs are emptied all over Britain every month. That well-known mad dash to find a working ATM when you need to pay for something with physical money is getting more and more difficult, especially with bank branches disappearing.

We’ve all been there when we realized the taxi driver doesn’t accept card payments or the store we’re in has a card machine malfunction.

Every main street should have a hole in the wall, believes large provider Link.

Its CEO, John Howells, has set Money Mail a challenge: to excavate a money desert where it is impossible to withdraw physical cash for free. If we can find one, he’ll try to do something about it.

So has it become impossible to withdraw cash in your area? Get in touch – we’d love to install an ATM for you.

j.beard@dailymail.co.uk