Barclays has closed the account of a GP practice leaving doctors fearing their patients lives could be put “at risk”.
Orchard Surgery in Royston, Hertfordshire, has been shut out of its accounts for more than two weeks, cutting it off from vital NHS funding and rendering it unable to buy patients’ medicine or pay staff over Christmas.
The surgery, which has banked with Barclays for more than 20 years, had its accounts closed after failing to respond to requests to renew out-of-date signatures on its banking mandate, which raised a security flag.
The GP surgery has several people on £150 to £250k annual incomes (including pensions rights at least) and they can’t organise bank signatures?
Quite glorious professionalism, no?
Bearing in mind how long it takes my GP surgery to answer the phone (You are caller number 17 in the queue) it comes as little surprise that they couldn’t be arsed to read emails.
With all those non-medical administrators making up over 30% of nhs staff you’d at least expect the mundane clerical stuff to get done. So what are they all doing with their time? (The hefty ladies at reception and sitting at their desks don’t look the TikTok dancing types).
This isn’t just happening to inefficient GP surgeries. A friend of mine has just been ‘de-banked’ in her role as Treasurer of a small beekeeping association. Barclays sent a letter demanding some information within 5 working days (f*ckers never respond to you within those sort of timescales) and as they didn’t get a response they closed the account. The letter had been delayed in the post, then had to be forwarded to her, hence the delay.
There seems to be a concerted effort within the banking system to drive ordinary people doing ordinary things out of it. I bet if you are a ‘Friends of Palestine’ or ‘LGBTs for child genital mutilation’ charity you don’t get de-banked……
Interpal was debanked 15 years back….
I used to bank with Barclays only because they had a branch in my village. Their services was quite poor, but I had no real griprs. They froze my account becausr of their own clerical error 20 years ago. I moved my money to Bank of Scotland Business, who were brilliant, until they started going bust.
They should have a practice manager to sort out things like this…
They can’t organise bank signatures because (if it’s anything remotely like the GP practice here) there isn’t a time when all the staff are present so tasks are always delegated to someone who isn’t in and they don’t do any writing other than clackety-clackety keyboard stuff with digital prescriptions sent to the pharmacy next door.
Earlier this year a lady at my nearest HSBC lied through her teeth saying they couldn’t process a large payment to HMRC at their branch. The fact it was 20 minutes before closing time was mere coincidence. There were no other customers waiting to be served.
The branch I went to on the following day managed it within minutes and told me every branch in the country could have done it. I complained and eventually received a grovelling apology from HSBC.
Barclays!!!
Might have told this story before. Tried to do an online transfer on the website & found I was locked out of my account. No e-mails or letters. No phone call No PM’s on the account page. Took 3 hours on the phone to find that they’d updated my identification requirement. So they wanted a copy of my passport certified by my Spanish bank. Which I arranged & sent. Nothing happened for 3 weeks. Another marathon on the phone resulted in – “it wasn’t acceptable because it was certified in Spanish”. WTF do they expect it to be? They’ve asked for a legal document. Legal in Spain is done in Spanish, Gallician, Catalan & Basque. Not in English. If it was in English it wouldn’t be a legal document in Spain & not worth the paper it was written on. So my bank wouldn’t issue it. What they would need would be a notarised copy with notarised translation of the certification done by a public notary.
This was with over half a million sitting in my current account.
Needless to say, I no longer bank with Barclays.
Notarised translation, or recognised translation agency is a common requirement.
In France when I moved there and during my time there, I was obliged to produce a certified translation of birth certificate, bank statements, and other stuff from time to time.
And for 2 weeks? The NHS can’t find a couple of people to assign to the surgery to do some ordering within a couple of hours?
Doctor’s are afraid their own administrative incompetence could put patient’s lives at risk.
I’m the treasurer of our little society with four active members (soon to be two due to house moves) with a turnover of £600pa, and I manage to get the Barclays security checks and mandates dealt with.
We’ve had problems with the bank (well actually a relatively small and local building society).
They too went through this know your customer malarky – but did it in what could be considered the most customer unfriendly way possible. Out of the blue we got a letter demanding we supply some information, and the forms to provide it on. Of course, the forms were “caters for every customer type and size possible” so contained a bewildering array of options – except due to the legal structure* of a church as part of the Church of England, not exactly the right combination for us !
Of course, requests for clarification of just what they wanted went ignored – and finally when we got a letter warning us that they were going to freeze our accounts as we weren’t replying to their letters, we got “really annoyed” and I hand delivered letters of complaint addressed to several directors. We never even got a reply to any of them. Fortunately, in our local branch we have some very helpful staff – one of whom arranged for someone at head office to call and talk us through the forms.
I have a lot of sympathy for people struggling with these issues.
* I try not to get involved in that side of things, but AIUI, each PCC (Parochial Church Council, legally responsible for the running of it’s parish and church) is a charity – but while we are all separate legal entities, as a charity we are under an umbrella of the CoE.