Debt Free Direct Blog

A new study suggests Motorway service stations are losing out on £11m a year in revenue because so many drivers believe they are too expensive.

The research reveals millions of motorists prefer to drive past the stop-off points unless for road emergencies such as using the toilet or to top up on petrol. The result is an estimated £115m loss over a ten year period, said market analyst Mintel who conducted the survey polling 2,000 motorists.

Additional findings include that up to 24% of drivers have not made a single stop at a motorway service station during the past 3 years.

Only 42% of motorists buy food or drink when they do stop and for a substantial number that is not a breakfast or sit-down meal, but little more that a takeaway coffee.

Analysts Mintel estimates the size of the service station market will drop from £594m in 2005 to £479m a year by 2015 – if going on today’s prices.

The recession has seen a fall in road usage in general, and motorway services have been further hit by claims their meals are over-priced.

One in five motorists have admitted to taking a packed lunch or their own food, because of the current economic climate and the over-priced items available at stations.

A Mintel spokesman said: “Full service restaurant have continued their decline in popularity amongst travellers as time pressures increase.

“It is the grab-and-go options which have proved popular in recent years, resulting in coffee shops being the most frequented outlets at service stations.”

The chief executive of Britain’s newest high street bank, Metro, says the new start-up has made an encouraging opening.
Customers have flooded to the first ‘new’ bank in Britain for over a century, since it launched in Holborn last month.
Metro Bank claims to have opened more accounts in its first month that it had predicted for the entire year at the flagship branch.

Craig Donaldson, Chief Executive, told news agency Reuters the Holborn branch was well ahead of its internal goals but stopped short of revealing precise figures until the bank releases official results.

Friday marked the opening of the second London branch in Earls Court, and unlike the fanfare and exuberant opening of the Holborn branch, only a handful of customers were drawn in on opening day.

Anthony Thompson, Chairman of Metro Bank, has said he is confident that ‘it will get busier’ and confirmed the bank is looking to hire 100 additional workers to fill vacancies at the Earls court branch.

Metro Bank also plan to expand and open up several more branches across the capital this year, with plans already in place to launch 12 further outlets across London over the next two years.

Business banking is also an area which interests Metro, with Thompson insisting he has a ‘waiting list of 200 people looking to open business accounts’.

Metro Bank launched in July and claimed to put the ‘wow’ back into banking. After a grand opening day event in Holborn – complete with jazz band, free ice creams, goody bags and dog biscuits, the bank got down to business with offers of a new bank account being ready and opened in just 15 minutes. It’s convienient opening hours, 8am to 8pm through the week, as well as weekend banking make it the most accessible on the high street.

Lloyds, Britain’s biggest bank, is receiving over 2,000 complaints a day from angry customers, the bank recently admitted.

Lloyds TSB, which is 43% owned by the taxpayer after the multi-billion-pound bailout to save it during the credit crunch, admitted in total they had received 300,000 complaints in the first six months of the year.

Shockingly, only one in ten complaints ended in an apology or compensation for the let-down customers, leaving a remarkable 90% dismissed.

By contrast to Lloyds TSB however, RBS upheld eight out of every ten complaints, which has raised questions over how there can be such a disparity.

The Financial Services Authority have ordered banks to publish the full extent of their customers’ dissatisfaction, as the news follows on from earlier this year when Royal Bank of Scotland admitted it was receiving  more than 1,600 complaints every working day. The Independent Financial Ombudsman Service (IFOS) also reported the mis-selling of loan insurance and in-store credit as reasons why their complaints handling had reached record heights.

The figures from the Lloyds group, which also includes Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Cheltenham & Gloucester, were described as ‘disappointing’ by consumer group Which?.

Lloyds also revealed they had finally ‘closed’ an astonishing 600,000 outstanding complaints this year, ending a huge backlog.

A substantial amount of complaints were from customers complaining about overdraft charges whose cases had been put on hold until the supreme court decided whether banks had to pay compensation for overcharging customers. The banks eventually won the case against the Office of Fair Trading, however Lloyds TSB have seemingly used this ruling to dismiss the copious amounts of pending complaints. This was despite many complaints separately being held upheld by the banking ombudsman.

Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society has also published its complaints, revealing that it had received 90,200 between October 2009 and April 2010. It was also revealed they turned down eight out of ten banking customers who complained.

New figures show the number of people unemployed in the UK fell by 49,000, to 2.46 million during the first three months leading to June this year.

It is the second consecutive month the number of people jobless has fallen, and is the biggest drop in three years.

The number of people employed increased by 184,000, the largest quarterly rise since 1989, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) said.

The claimant count for those seeking unemployment benefit in July fell by 3,800 to 1.46 million.

The rise in employment was largely the result of an increase in the number of part-time workers of 115,000, taking the total to 7.84 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992, the ONS said.

There was an increase of 68,000 of the number of full-time workers on the quarter to reach a total of 21.18 million.

The rate of unemployment however, remained the same at 7.8%.

The Office of National Statistics also said that average pay was up by 1.3% on a year earlier, a slower annual rate of growth than in the previous three months.

Some analysts however focused on the small change in the number of people seeking unemployment benefits, saying this was further evidence that the economic recovery was starting to lose momentum.

David Page at Investec said, “The claimant count fell less than expected and that does raise concerns that recovery from here could be slower.”

Vicky Redwood from Capital Economics said, ”This might be a sign that the slowdown in the wider economic recovery is already spreading to the labour market, and with sharp public sector cuts looming, we still that that renewed rises in unemployment lie ahead.”

This news comes weeks after the UK economy reported a record rate of growth for GDP.