Brits who suffered as a result of the infamous PPI scandal could still receive a rebate following reports a new legal claim has been launched.

If successful, it could cost the banks £18 billion and see millions of "ripped off" Brits receive a substantial cash settlement.

The Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal - which escalated in 2008 - was one of the biggest ever seen in the UK. Millions of customers claimed refunds totalling billions of pounds, with banks and other financial providers fined for their conduct.

Now over a decade later, it has been revealed that legal papers were filed on Friday afternoon in Birmingham County Court against some of the UK's biggest banks in a record class action suit.

The legal claim, led by law firm Harcus Parker, accuses banks of secretly charging a whopping 80% commission on personal protection insurance (PPI) sales, and not refunding this in their previous compensation claims.

Barclays, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, MBNA, Santander, Tesco Bank, The Co-op John Lewis, Nationwide and Yorkshire Building Society have all been named in the class action lawsuit which has already gathered 350,000 claimants.

Harcus Parker estimates the average payout for individuals joining the suit will be around £2,500.

A legal win against the banks could help hard-pressed Brits afford rising bills in the cost of living crisis.

Damon Parker, senior partner at Harcus Parker, told the Sun: "This group action is intended to force financial institutions which profited from PPI to pay back money that they should have never taken in the first place.

"The banks and credit card companies have known for years that they should pay this PPI secret commission money and have been using every trick in the book to avoid paying."

The case, which is listed as PPI Plevin Group Litigation, comes after around £36billion has already been paid back by the banks after regulators and the courts clamped down on the mis-selling on personal protection insurance alongside mortgages, credit cards and loans since the 1990s.

Around 50 million PPI policies were sold and the high profits for banks led to a super-complaint from the Citizens Advice Bureau to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) about the racket.

British banks were accused of aggressively selling 'ineffective and inefficient' – but highly profitable – payment protection insurance to customers.

High-pressure tactics were also allegedly claimed by customers.

However, the new legal claim, led by Harcus Parker, is open to those who had a PPI claim rejected, or those who were only paid back the chunk of commission that was above a 50% premium.

PPI secret commission claims are sometimes known as “Plevin claims” after a case in 2015 when Susan Plevin took her lender, Paragon Personal Finance, to court after discovering that 72% of the £5,780 premium she had paid for her PPI policy was commission.

"Our claim hopes to end PPI claims once and for all"

Lawyers said that their class action had a good chance of succeeding as the Supreme Court has already ruled in 2014 that a bank’s failure to disclose a large commission when PPI was sold can be defined as unfair under the Consumer Credit Act.

The new class action is targeting the millions of amounts of commission still kept by the banks.

"The public is presently unaware that banks still retain billions of pounds of profit from PPI.

"Our claim hopes to end PPI claims once and for all," Mr Parker said.

A spokesman for UK Finance, the body that represents the banks and building societies, said: "The FCA's deadline for customers to make a complaint to a firm which sold them PPI was in August 2019.

"Firms will review and respond to any claims made in legal proceedings as required."