Changing Banks?

Thinking of changing Bank Accounts? Choose not to be off-loaded to Santander in the RBS give-away? Be very aware, if you are receiving a State Pension. The glib promises of the banks to take all the stress out of switching Bank Accounts is all one-sided. They only look after the outgoings, you have to sort out all of your incomes. Not so stress free after-all.

Worse of all, before you even think of changing bank accounts your need to tell DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) as they are taking 'upto eight weeks' is the official line, to changing details! Unless you are content to miss maybe two months payments you are stuffed. You will not get your new account details until you have committed yourself. By then it is too late to get the DWP's to amend your account details.

Join the queue of pension receivers who have been notified of a returned payment just because the lumbering bureaucratic machinery has not got round to processing your earlier (in good time) notified account details. They are no short cuts. You will be sure to miss a payment. The only small upside is that after surviving the blind sampling of the automatic telephone response the humans you get to talk are very pleasant and almost proactive.

In this electronic age is it really acceptable for a government department to be working to stone-age time-scales? A woefully inadequate service and no one to complain to, just suffer.

Postscript. It seems that just maybe I have fallen into to the timewarp trap. Organisations are now setup to manange by telephone these essential detail changes. Whereas trapped in my past I assumed that such confidential and vulnerable transaction were best dealt with by the old fashioned letter. Speculation and untested. Maybe telephone is fast and best and letters are consumed to the slow lane.