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On a fairly quiet news day for secured loans I thought I’d just do a quick post about something I hadn’t spotted before.

I was having a quick flick through some reports about the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and noticed a report saying that since 2002, Oxford had employed 40 people from Springhill Open Prison as volunteer advisers.

Now I know next to nothing about the Prison Service or the rehabilitation of offenders, but this strikes me as a pretty neat relationship between the organisations. On one hand the prisoners learn a new skill and probably get a strong feeling of “self worth” from helping people and on the other hand the CAB manages to get enough recruits to fulfill demand.

Independent research has concluded that prisoners selected as advisers perform just as well as non-prisoner volunteers. The research also says that CAB clients were just as happy with the service supplied from prisoners as they were with that from other volunteers. Although some did say that they wanted prior disclosure that the volunteer was a prisoner and others wanted people serving a sentence for several specific types of offence, quite understandably, excluded from the scheme.

I had another dig and found that last December the government produced a green paper called ‘Reducing Reoffending Through Skills and Employment’ and no doubt we will see such schemes grow.

Quotation: For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

Well it’s a quiet Friday - with nothing much happening on the Secured Loans news pulse. I can’t dig out one single item of information about the Secured Loans industry.

Perhaps it’s a lull before the storm and next week we’ll see the FSA, OFT, ICO and all the other acronyms of British Officialdom come out all guns blazing!

The only pieces of news I can report on relate to things I’ve mentioned in the last week or so. After their early teething problems, DB Mortgages has announced the launch of a new product range. The product rates will include new two and three-year fixed rates across the whole of the range. The current two-year base rate tracker pricing is also being revised.

And after yesterday’s news about the Which? report on Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) the Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor Vince Cable has made a statement

“This finding emphatically underlines the growing and glaring need for a genuinely independent system of generic financial advice which does not depend on the self interest of people trying to earn commission.

“The government has put a lot of money into financial education and is supporting the principle of a levy on city companies in order to strengthen financial education. However, this report makes it clear that a more urgent problem is the lack of independent financial advice which people can access, before they run into serious debt”

It’s a sorry state of affairs when Which?, as part of an investigation, visited 57 financial advisers in England and Wales (25 tied and 35 independent) and found the majority in breach of FSA rules.

Rules introduced by the FSA last year require financial advisers to give two “keyfacts” documents to the client. One outlines the cost of the advice and how it is to be paid for (commission or fee) and one outlines the services offered and also stipulates whether the firm is restricted on the products it offers.

Which? found 80% of advisers failed to explain the cost document, 35% failed to provide it and 30% also failed to provide the services document.

The study also found 37% of advisers failed to give adequate assessment to ascertain financial needs and risk attitude.

Only half the advisers visited for pensions advice properly assessed attitudes to investment risk, while 76 percent asked for protection advice failed to tell researchers of the risks associated with income protection should income fall. And four advisers (two tied from Abbey and two IFAs) recommended the wrong type of policy.

A Bradford & Bingley adviser selling protection insurance said they were free to choose the product provider, when in fact they are tied to Legal & General. An adviser at HSBC, again selling protection insurance, said the bank had an agreement with different insurance companies. But the company is only able to offer its own protection policy.

As the above illustrates, the worst offenders seem to be the tied advisers where nearly half led researchers to believe they had more products to offer than they actually had. A “tied” adviser is one attached to a building society or bank and is normally very restricted in the products they can offer.

My advice, for what its worth, is to try out a number of IFAs to see what each can offer (most provide a free half an hour consultation). Another piece of advice is to TRY and make time to assess your own financial situation and endeavour to work out your own financial strategy. It may involve a lengthy stretch at your PC sifting through various documents, but in the long run you could save thousands.