COMMENT RICHARD DYSON: Who would put trust in our insurers?

Updated: 17:20 EST, 12 September 2009

Should you trust an insurance company with your savings? Not based on the evidence. Featured today in The Financial Mail is the story of one couple whose retirement will be many thousands of pounds poorer, thanks to an insurance company.

In 1988, Ted Chandler, like hundreds of thousands of others, was wrongly advised to put his pension savings into the supposedly safe hands of the insurance industry.

Years later, when insurers were forced to review such cases by the authorities, Ted, like many others, was compensated. But that compensation hasn't put matters right. And there is nothing he can do about it - no wonder he feels bitter.

Problems with endowment mortgages are not news. But the bulk of endowment policies taken out in the expectation that they would pay off a mortgage have yet to mature.

Are your savings safe with an Insurance company?

And when they do their frequently horrendous returns - some as low as two or three per cent per year over decades - leave savers facing huge mortgage shortfalls.

As with pensions, the insurance industry, which devised and sold endowment mortgages, was reluctant to admit there were any problems. But as with pensions, insurers reluctantly paid out billions of pounds in compensation as complaints mounted and it was impossible to ignore the scale of the problem.

Sadly, as with the pensions scandal, the compensation has all too often not put matters right. One of the worst aspects of the endowments debacle is the fact that the insurance industry, having left customers high and dry and often in financial difficulty, now offers no advice.

As tens of thousands of letters to Financial Mail have attested, there is scant help or comprehensible information available to help people make crucial decisions.

The salesmen who were so keen to sell the policies have vanished. And the insurers, which published fat booklets trumpeting the merits of endowments, have fallen silent.

And what about insurers' other great savings scheme - the with profits bond? For a minority, these have worked, but for most they have been a source of anxiety.

Despite the above, the insurance industry remains in a state of denial. It does not acknowledge mistakes and seems not to learn from them.

Time after time, insurers invent complicated savings vehicles and then flog them to the public by paying huge commissions to salesmen. A straightforward investment? You'll never get it from an insurer. A value-for-money investment? Even less of a chance.

Now, salesmen are encouraging investors to sign up to 'insurance bonds' or 'investment bonds' ( generally provided by insurers) in which to wrap a range of other funds. Beware. They are expensive and, in many cases, the tax perks they supposedly offer are illusory.

There was time when parents encouraged their children to save, as soon as they could afford to, into an endowment or other plan offered by a trusty insurer.

That confidence was misplaced. The insurance industry has let savers down. Today the best advice is to steer clear of insurers where your investments are concerned.

Financial Mail has long campaigned for greater public disclosure of the complaints that companies receive, how these complaints are handled and how often they end favourably for the complainant.

This week brings a landmark in that process. The Financial Ombudsman Service, which handles disputes between finance firms and their customers, is publishing data on complaints it receives, broken down by individual companies.

The data will show the number of new complaints, by brand name and by overall group name, that have come to the FOS in the first six months of this year, by category of business.

Insurance companies are less than ecstatic. The trade body, the Association of British Insurers, has said that it is 'very concerned' that consumers might find it 'misleading'. The FOS says the information will simply show up firms that are not doing a good job of handling complaints.

And who is in a tizz about the idea of 'misleading' people? Only the very same firms that have had to be forced, kicking and screaming, to compensate the hundreds of thousands of customers they have misled over the years.