Land of Leather and chief executive given strap over PPI sales

Furniture retailer Land of Leather and its chief executive, Paul Briant, have been fined £210,000 and £14,000, respectively, for inadequate controls around the sale of payment protection insurance (PPI). The firm was authorised to sell PPI on 5 May 2006 but did not complete re-training of its sales staff, identified two months previously as a high priority by external accountants, until November 2006. An online distance learning package, designed to assess the understanding of the sales staff, was not fully rolled out by June 2007, the end of the period covered by the penalty. Findings from a pilot in one region are worrying as only eight of 29 employees proved competent. The only check on sales quality across the business in the relevant period was observation by store managers but after the average PPI take-up rate across the firm’s 90 stores declined from 95% to 67% following re-training, it began to plan for alternative monitoring through mystery shops and post-sale customer contact, a point that found favour with FSA when it set the penalty, although neither initiative had been implemented by the time the regulator identified the rule breaches.