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Extra 500,000 unclaimed Premium Bond prizes - MSE News
Former_MSE_Naomi
Former MSE 519 Posts
A further 500,000 Premium Bond prizes are yet to be claimed, bringing the total unclaimed prize pot to almost £77 million - check now to see if you've won...
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'Extra 500,000 unclaimed Premium Bond prizes - check if you've won'
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'Extra 500,000 unclaimed Premium Bond prizes - check if you've won'
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As a country we rate ourselves as masters of technology and logic, but our government really has no idea who or where we all are?
As you'll no doubt be aware, there are many government departments, and some share data with each other, so in some cases they'll be able and willing to trace individuals if they feel the need to do so, e.g. HMRC or DWP.
However, NS&I doesn't have the responsibility to go around chasing those who haven't claimed prizes, although they do provide facilities to manage accounts online, and/or to pay winnings to a nominated account, if the customer wishes to do this, but for those choosing not to do so, the customer retains the responsibility to check for prizes and claim them manually, just like lotteries, raffles, etc....
Given the bulk of prizes are for £25. How much do you think should be spent tracing people. Who haven't bothered to update their own address details.
Does the prize fund grow or does the money get hoovered up by the public purse?
I suppose if they wanted to, and had the resources for it, they could track them all down and hand them their prizes. But they don't, so they won't (certainly not for the smaller ones, maybe if there was an unclaimed million they'd put some effort into it, just for the publicity). Instead, what they do is occasionally remind people "hey, the last time you moved house did you update premium bonds? If not them your prizes have been going to your old house and you're losing out" through articles such as this.
I called NS&I and discovered that for some reason (none actually given), my winnings were NOT being sent directly to my bank even though when I logged on all my bank details were there.
So it pays to check! Hopefully my bonds are now properly set up to pay straight to my bank... but I will keep an eye on it just in case.
Far too difficult to expect there to be any central digitalisation to make living with bureaucracy a happier experience - too much profit in leaving opportunity for chaos methinks.
One reason we still don't have the bloody pension dashboard covering every single pension, state and private. More vaporware in the Queens Speech even though we could have bought the system from a more developed country at the drop of a hat? No no ... something like that needs to be given to someone like Capita to make a mint out of and to string out as long as possible and give our friends time to go seriously over budget on a cost plus basis, eh? Oh and we have to let the pension companies, especially Aviva have a chance to milk their unsuspecting customers a lot more first before making pensions so transparent.
Same procrastination would nicely serve the big corporate sponsored pension plan trustees, giving them a chance alongside the likes of Goldman Sachs and Willis Towers Watson to save their employers a whole lot more money by dreaming up more novel ways of valuing the assets and Liabilities, so as to keep employer's contributions down. UK protects businesses, right - cos' they're the life blood? Oh and don't forget the contracted out fiasco. The pensions dashboard would have to actually show what it all means!
And Thrugelmir, how much money do you think we all spend as individuals in wasted time trying to get through on umpteen customer service lines with umpteen players to constantly check that there are no loose ends in our wake which could lose us money? Come on, keep up. Computers aren't just for high frequency trading. They really ought to be primarily to make life easier for us all. Why do you think some European countries always figure highest on the happiness charts? Because they can be confident their country knows where they live and does not allow corporates or government departments to constantly try to trip up existing "customers" by deliberately losing track of them, causing the adult population to constantly be running round in at least a few circles every year dealing with stabilising the built in uncertainty that disorder, lack of logical auto updating of related personal data in multiple official databases, and the ensuing general chaos that causes - that's one reason perhaps why many of us ain't so happy
The consequence is that in those countries where they are more enlightened about digital, there is no such thing as receiving a letter from a utility company or a telecoms company telling you after the event that when you forgot to ask to renew your fixed rate deal they naturally put you on a hiked tariff, and tough luck, or from an outsource agency of a life insurance company telling you that they appear to have lost contact with you when you haven't even moved since you started the relationship, and that your investment will go into an untraced funds account if you don't make contact, or even if you did move.
UK loves making life difficult by having every organisation doing its own thing and making up its own business excuses for not doing something.
In a clued-up fully digitalised country, you tell one utility company or bank or government department that you've moved, and all your records with all utility companies and all government and local authority departments and insurance companies and G.P. are updated simultaneously, including you being automatically allocated a new G.P. if you've moved any distance. You know it makes sense, surely? Never mind petty bleating about the cost of specially tracing an existing customer for the sake of £25 owed. How on earth did the Post Office/NSI of all people lose track in the first place? I bet Experian of Equifax or Lexis Nexis or one or two others in the shady end of the CRA industry could tell NSI instantly where we all are, but the way UK works, that's called a unique business offer, one that is licensed by government but for which even government departments would have to pay to have the private sector feed back joined up accurate analysis and up to date data sourced from the government's own diverse databases.
Private sector parasites like Equifax, Experian Lexis Nexis and Capita just love it.
Are you happy we do it that way, and don't do things like a clued up digitalised country does? I'm guessing the status quo in the UK suits your ideas of how to run a country just fine?
When has it ever been any different? I know that many are dependent upon the Nanny state. Didn't realise the extent that personal responsibility had been absolved. Or are people just becoming lazy.
The largest data stores on the planet should not be in private sector hands like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et al, and the other shady outfits I mentioned earlier. The biggest should be government controlled databases, and consequently Premium Bond winnings should never in 2019 be "lost" awaiting claim.
And change should never be corralled by big business and lauded as a phenomenon of modern life designed so smart Alecs can make money out of those who struggle to follow the twists and turns of deliberately complex corporate implementations e.g. energy company domestic tariffs - hundreds of them; or from downright crooked intransigence in leaving some things the same to wrongfoot customers and create windfall opportunity which exploits loopholes that the public haven't spotted or have forgotten about or were never reminded about. Change should be for the betterment of all, and certain types of change should be far more rigorously forced upon major business from time to time and also co-ordinated far better between government departments. We are swimming now in our own personal data stored every which way.
There is no "off" switch nor boundary fence - anything goes with our data. Even deliberately causing our data to be declared lost is acceptable, and creates false and conflicting new personal data in the process - "He's untraceable"/"No he's not, he's been over there since Tuesday last week and he'll be back in the usual place next month"/"He never told us"/"He told us"/"We told you"/"Yes but he didn't"/"We are protecting his personal data"/"So are we"/"But we're a government department"/"So are we"/"We're private and only following DP rules". "So where is he?" / "Who's asking?" / "Are you asking me or them?" / "If you are asking me, it'll cost you". "Whose data is it anyway?" "His" / "And its up to him to make sure it is all correct" / "Is that even possible since his personal data resides in 850 databases at the last count?" / "That's up to him".
Sometimes I get the impression UK runs separate government departments a bit like how we ran the Army and Air Force in totally disjointed and disgruntled fashion when we invaded Normandy in 1944. The head honchos in each were not singing from the same hymnsheet due to conflicts of interest between some big egos and cliques and even downright subterfuge - some egos needed to be right ad they needed other egos to be wrong - amazing since we had a war on - behaviour almost as bad as we've seen in Brexit. Have we not yet learned better how to behave? For the common good? Apparently not
I do get the argument that a fully joined-up world of big government and big data would have its merits but of course there are any number of reasons why it hasn't happened thus far, cost being an obvious one but also cultural resistance - many countries are quite happy with the concept of a national ID card but talk of introducing this in the UK sent many to the barricades, sounding off about Big Brother and civil liberties, etc, so don't hold your breath for the revolution you're seemingly pining for!