I’ll believe it when I see it – or read the Mail

Have you heard the one about the bank taskforce being set up to help grieving families, enabling people to cancel a loved one’s accounts “in a single step”?

Apparently the “Tell Us Once” service is the brainchild of the Daily Mail (yes, really) and it has been taken up by the British Bankers Association working with the Building Societies Association.

Now more bosses from Britain’s biggest firms have written to the Mail to show their support. This includes BT, whose chief executive of Consumer, John Petter, waxed lyrical:

“We understand that dealing with a bereavement can be extremely distressing and upsetting. We have a specialist customer service team here in the UK who can help during this difficult time to either transfer or stop a BT account, and are keen to see how this can be integrated with the Tell Us Once service.”

Well, I can vouch that transferring an account (from joint names to single) works efficiently. That happened to Mil after Fil’s death in May.

Unfortunately, that’s all that was efficient. Asking for anything more than that, e.g. switching a phone line from one room to another in a care home, appears to be beyond their level of competency.

And if BT “understands that dealing with a bereavement can be extremely distressing and upsetting” why have they not, to date, acknowledged the complaint sent on behalf of Mil more than two weeks ago?

We don’t expect them to resolve the complaint in such a short period of time but a letter/ text/ phone call/ email saying they had received it would be nice.

It was interesting that among the “bosses from Britain’s biggest firms” there was no comment from Santander.

This is the company that, on deleting Fil from the joint accounts he and Mil held with it, also deleted all the details of the lasting powers of attorney it had recorded.

This now leaves no LPA on the accounts. And guess what their initial response was?

They gave us some new forms to fill in i.e. suggesting the three LPAs who had jumped through these particular hoops more than three years ago would have to repeat the exercise.

Needless to say, IDGOM has initiated another complaint.
PS - I would like to thank IDGOM reader JS of Chichester for getting in touch. And I thought I needed to get out more.