ISA help - has Halifax acted unfairly?

banana12

Hi, I need some advice with ISA deadline looming.
In as small a nutshell as I can...

December 2015 - I opened a H2B ISA with Halifax. I had a dormant current account with them I had honestly forgotten about and the ISA was tagged onto this, with the same details. Unfortunately the postal address was my parents’ previous address, which they left in January 2015 and I hadn't lived at for several years before that. I didn’t see anything at the time to alert me to this. Halifax says it is my responsibility to make sure my details are up to date, which I accept.

Fast forward to now - I followed the procedure to transfer the H2B to a LISA with Skipton by depositing £1 last year, and moving everything across now. I started the transfer on 9 February and chased Skipton on 7 March as the money was still in the H2B. Skipton said it had chased Halifax on 1 March but heard nothing. When I spoke to Skipton again yesterday (15 March) they still hadn’t heard anything from Halifax.

I chased Halifax yesterday and was told the transfer had not happened because the addresses didn’t match. Worse, the H2B had been closed and balance transferred into the dormant current account because there was no national insurance number on the account, a legal requirement. Halifax has been sending letters to the incorrect address since February 2016, which obviously I have never seen. They had it on the system that some of these letters had been returned to them as I was not at the address.

Halifax has said it can only reinstate the H2B if the error is theirs, which it does not think it is.

For me, this means I can’t complete an ISA transfer and therefore I will only be able to move in another £3,999 for this tax year. Down the line I lose out on around £425 from the 25% bonus, as well as any compound interest.

My complaint:

Can it be considered I was given reasonable notice of the account closure if Halifax has it on their system that the only way they were trying to let me know anything for over a year was being returned to them - they have my email address and telephone number and use of a messaging portal on my account online. Any of these could have been used to alert me to a problem over the course of 15 months.

Is it not Halifax’s error that they failed to respond to Skipton’s request for information from 1 March onwards that the transfer was not going ahead? I could have rectified the missing NINO and mismatching addresses quite easily if I had been given this information when I chased on 7 March, a week before Halifax closed the account.

It beggars belief that when we should be moving towards paperless banking, Halifax says its policy is only to communicate with me by letter. Why insist on having other methods of communication for me on the account if they then refuse to use them when it comes to something as important as closing an account?

Any help would be much appreciated, the potentially lost bonus and interest is crucial to me, as it would be anyone trying to afford a house.

Thanks!

dunstonh

Can it be considered I was given reasonable notice of the account closure if Halifax has it on their system that the only way they were trying to let me know anything for over a year was being returned to them - they have my email address and telephone number and use of a messaging portal on my account online. Any of these could have been used to alert me to a problem over the course of 15 months.

As they don't have the NI number, they can't keep the money in the ISA. So, there is a time element. And requirements are that they write to you.

Banks are not geared for individual emails. And portal messages with most banks are not for individual messages but corporate messages.

If you gave the NI number on the original application form, then you would be in a stronger position. If you put your new address on it too, that would help your cause. However, I saw a FOS rejection a few months back about a string of events that went wrong that were all down to the failure to keep the address up-to-date. The FOS said that it was the responsibility of the account holder to keep the bank up-to-date with the address.

It beggars belief that when we should be moving towards paperless banking, Halifax says its policy is only to communicate with me by letter.

The hypothetical end game does not change the position you are in now.

Why insist on having other methods of communication for me on the account if they then refuse to use them when it comes to something as important as closing an account?

Because important things should be in writing. Emails end up spam folders or can sit unread for months. They can also be read by anyone viewing copies on every server the email went through.

You say you take responsibility for your mistake. But then you blame Halifax for not using other methods. I am not sure how much responsibility you are taking. All that said, if the application to open the account asked you to supply NI number and address, then Halifax should take some of the responsibility.