The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 17
MONEY
Why so hard to get a
basic bank account?
I have a son, aged 42, who has some
learning difficulties. He works full time
for Asda and lives independently
although he does have great difficulties
handling his money. About ten years ago
he got into debt and ended up paying
grotesque bank charges. It was only the
fact that I was in a position to bail him
out that stopped the situation spiralling
out of control.
As part of the bailout we opened a
joint current account with the YorkshireM
y wife and I wish to get
Spanish residency so we
can stay in our property
in Nerja, Spain, for longer
periods than the 90 days
in 180 days rule allows.
The last hurdle is getting
a letter from Santander,
our bank, to show that
we have had an average
balance of more than the sterling
equivalent of €34,000 for six months.
The Spanish deem this a viable income.
I have been in phone contact with
Santander UK since August and it will
not provide a letter to this effect, even
though we have had more than this in
our Santander accounts from March.
Our agent dealing with our
application has sent us an example letter
supplied by Barclays UK. Santander will
not accept communication by email or
fax so would not look at this example.
Instead, Santander has sent statements
and two letters that are all unacceptable
to the Spanish authorities. Finally it sent
two letters saying it can’t provide this.
During my last call I was told Santander
is unable to process such a request.
My phone conversations have been
somewhat of an ordeal, to say the least.
I have eight Santander text references on
my phone. All involved being on the
phone for a minimum of 20 minutes and
in some cases up to one and a half hours.
The same recorded voice to choose
options, the same music and long wait.
The September phone calls were also
more expensive because we were in
Spain. One staff member said she’d write
the required letter, but this prompted a
refusal letter from one of the managers.
My obvious option is to transfer to
Barclays, but this will mean a further six
months’ wait for an average balance
letter. Perhaps I have been at fault for
not giving up sooner but I don’t get the
difficulty in writing a simple letter.
Maybe Ant or Dec could do it?Jill replies
The letter provided by Barclays was veryit should not be pursuing you for money.
SSE said that it had taken all necessary
action to correct its systems, and made
LCS aware too. But it added: “To
confirm, we have no control over the
service LCS offer when trying to
recuperate any outstanding. [sic]”
Pathetic.
It offered compensation of £80 then
£100, which you have rejected. Your
request for £250 has been passed to
senior management at Ovo. I have
passed all the correspondence to LCS
and asked it to remove your details from
its systems. If you have any further
problems, you know where I am.QUESTION
OF MONEY
JILL INSLEY
straightforward, and I saw no reason
why Santander couldn’t provide exactly
the same thing, so I sent it the copy you
had emailed to me. It took just three
days for the bank to decide this was
entirely possible.
It said: “We have spoken to Mr W to
apologise and sent the required letter,
refunded the £20 he paid for a bank
reference and paid £100 compensation
for the inconvenience.”Running out of energy
with this unfair demand
I wonder if you could help because both
my wife and I are getting extremely
distressed at SSE and its debt collector
LCS. My wife and I own a property in
Cheshire which is let out. Some weeks
ago we received a demand notice from
LCS for £1,112.50. I called LCS to explain
that the property is rented out.
It requested a letter from our letting
agent giving details of the tenant and
dates. The agent provided the letter but
LCS refused to accept this as proof. I
then contacted SSE, but continued
getting texts from LCS which I ignored,
thinking that SSE would sort the matter
out. My wife then had a demand from
LCS and texts.
I called SSE and waited over an hour
and a half to get a reply. The operator
confirmed that the debt was not in my
wife’s name. She tried to transfer me to
another agent, but after waiting for
another 30 minutes the line went dead.
More texts were followed this
morning by a telephone call demanding
money. I just do not know what to do to
resolve this matter. Can you help?Jill replies
Landlords are not responsible for energy
debts run up by their tenants. SSE
should not have chased you for this
money, and it especially should not have
sold the debt on to LCS Debt Recovery
while your name was attached to it.
The amount actually owed by your
tenant for gas was £890, but LCS had
added £777.50 in fees. The letter from
LCS also claimed that this substantial bill
had been drummed up in the space of
four days, from November 13 to 17 last
year, indicating that LCS was not only
chasing the wrong person but also for
the wrong period of time.
I asked SSE, which was taken over by
Ovo in January last year, to wipe your
details from this debt and to tell LCS thatOur Spanish
dream is on
hold thanks
to Santander
type of account and from June next year
standing orders and direct debits are
being removed from all YBS accounts.
This leaves us in a very difficult
situation, added to by the fact that he
lives in Yorkshire and I live in Cornwall.
Clearly, I need to find another account.
I am very reluctant to use any of the big
banks, partly because of my previous
experience, but also, all the accounts I
have investigated come with a debit card,
which would be like pouring petrol onto
the inferno of my son’s spending. I am
also worried that that bank’s marketing
will result in it trying to sell him a credit
card. Most important of all, other bank
accounts do not have a zero credit limit.
There must be thousands of people in
a similar situation. Is there any bank out
there which has a diversity policy, part
of which is to help people in this position
and does not view the most vulnerable
in society merely as cash cows?Jill replies
Until now Yorkshire Building Society has
offered savings accounts with ATM
cards, direct debits, but these services
are being withdrawn. You want a joint
account that offers no overdraft facility,
but which does provide direct debits and
standing orders. Several banks offer —
but typically do not promote — this type
of “basic” account, designed for people
who do not qualify for other types of
current account, usually because they
have a poor credit history.
As you had previously chosen a
building society, Nationwide’s FlexBasic
might suit you best. Its basic account can
be opened as a joint account, accessed
via the internet and mobile app and
Nationwide tells me that you can arrange
to not get marketing communications
about credit cards and other services.
Ideally you also want an account
which supplies a cash withdrawal card
rather than a debit card so as to slow
down your son’s spending, but I can’t
find any. If a bank does offer such a
service, I look forward to hearing from
them. Instead you could provide your
son with a pre-paid card onto which you
can load money as and when needed.ON
EY
LEY
Building Society into which his salary is
paid. I can oversee the account and
ensure that he has a float to cover his
monthly standing orders and direct
debits for the likes of gas, electricity and
TV licence. The account comes with a
cash card and facilities for setting up
standing orders and direct debits and
does not allow him to go overdrawn.
This has worked reasonably well,
despite an ongoing battle to stop him
spending virtually all his salary by
midway through the month.
The Yorkshire Building Society
informs me that from December 15 the
cash card is being withdrawn from thisWays to check
if your fund
manager has
gone rogue
Baker, a Cambridge history
graduate, has changed since
it launched.
In January 2019 it was
worth £261 million and held
91 stocks, 10.8 per cent of
which were in companies
worth less than £100 million.
Today it is a £1.7 billion fund
that holds 175 companies,
4.5 per cent of which are
smaller than £100 million.
The fund comprises a core
list of about 100 companies
that drive its growth. Of the
other 75, Baker is selling
some; he has a “nursery” of
about 30 small, less profitable
companies that he thinks will
prosper in the future, and
about two-dozen loss-making
stocks that account for no
more than 0.5 per cent each.
The family members and
friends who put in £2 million
to launch the fund in 2014
have been duly rewarded: a
£100,000 investment then
would be worth just over
£400,000 today. But over the
past six months the fund is up
3 per cent, against a 5.7 per
cent gain from the FTSE All-
Share index.
Baker said: “The fund’s key
objective has always been
to generate long-term
outperformance by investing
in stocks outside the FTSE
100, investing in companies
that can grow faster than the
rest of the market and fund
their own growth because of
their financial characteristics.
“Nothing has changed.
However, with the growth of
the fund the emphasis has
switched more towards mid-
caps. So far this doesn’t seem
to have been detrimental.”
Interactive Investor has
raised similar concerns about
the CFP SDL Buffettology
fund, which is on its Super 60
list of rated investments.
The fund has grown from
£600 million in January 2019
to £1.7 billion today, while the
average size of the companies
that the fund owns has grown
too.It is easy to buy a fund, forget
about it and hope that in a
decade or more your money
has grown, ideally more than
it would have done if you had
put it in a low-cost fund that
tracks the performance of a
basket of company shares.
But as we learnt from the
demise of the former star
stockpicker Neil Woodford, it
is not a wise strategy to buy a
fund and blindly trust the
manager to always do best by
investors.
One sign that Woodford
was in trouble was that he
went from investing in large,
dividend-paying British
businesses on cheap
valuations to small,
unprofitable start-ups that
paid little to no dividends
and were hard to sell.
A significant change in
strategy is one red flag that
things could be going wrong.
It may not be an automatic
signal to sell because it could
be part of an evolving plan,
but it is important to keep an
eye out for signs. Read the
fund fact sheets — easy to find
on Google— plus interim and
annual reports. Ask your fund
manager to send these to you
automatically.
When a fund grows
significantly it may favour
larger companies. If you
invested in it to gain exposure
to smaller companies, this
might be a problem.
If a £100 million fundwants to invest £5 million into
a £100 million company, it
will account for 5 per cent of
that fund’s portfolio — a large
portion. But for a £1 billion
fund, that £5 million stake
would be 0.5 per cent and is
unlikely to add much to the
fund’s overall returns.
Some investors and
analysts are asking if this has
happened at Chelverton UK
Equity Growth. The make-up
of this fund, run by JamesDavid BrenchleyNeil Woodford