MSE News: Halifax slashes Help to Buy ISA rate for new customers

bowlhead99

mischievouspangolin wrote: »

What’s going on, MSE? Is this because your links to Santander and Virgin Money bring in revenue for you, while the building societies’ links don’t?

Please issue a correction to your weekly email and news story and feature the two building societies alongside Santander and Virgin Money. If you don’t, I and others will be forced to question your impartiality.

Before you blow a blood vessel, the wording on the best buy page seems fine to me, it's just the wording on the 'halifax withdraws its top rate' article that needs a minor tweak.

At the moment it says:

Santander is now the only company to offer the top rate of 4% on its Help to Buy ISA, and it's fairly flexible in how you can pay in to it.

What would be more accurate would be to say

Santander is now the only company which offers the top rate of 4% on its Help to Buy ISA and is fairly flexible in how you can pay in to it.

If I want to put my help to buy money into Penrith's offering I have to either drive the 600 mile round trip to Cumbria or send an application pack by post. Then I have to produce my passbook (in branch or by post) if I wish to make a withdrawal. Whereas Santander is a bigger organisation which can afford to run a sophisticated online platform and you can apply by phone if you are not near one of the 1300 branches (1300 times the amount of branches that Penrith have).

On the Best Buy article, they are trying to find us the 'best' buy. If two providers offer a similar rate, they have to choose between them - that's the purpose of applying a qualitative description like 'best' as opposed to a quantitative description like 'highest paying' which might have joint winners sharing the glory.

Under the table, they say they can think of no circumstances in which the various other accounts are better than the ones they highlighted:

Comparing Penrith to Santander: Penrith doesn't pay a higher rate than Santander, has 1/1300th of the branches, doesn't let you open by phone, and doesn't let you monitor it or make withdrawals online. Even if you lived in Penrith, Santander has a branch within 100m of its rival, so there's no location-based advantage for Penrith BS. So do you think Penrith BS deserves to push Santander off the top spot, or be listed in the also-rans? I think the latter.

Virgin has an honourable mention on the best-buys list because you can open it online which is important to some people (rather than set it up by phone and manage it online thereafter). For a 3% account, Tipton doesn't beat Virgin because it doesn't pay a higher rate, doesn't allow you to open it by transferring an existing ISA, doesn't allow you to open or manage it online - it doesn't sound like 'best buy' material to me. It's an also-ran.

They do put those two accounts you mention at the top of their list of 'other providers offering a help to buy ISA' because they have the best rates of those non- bestbuy accounts.