Opening savings accounts for Dad using Power of Attorney (no current ID)

turquoisespiff

Hi. My Dad's currently in a nursing home and does not have capacity. When his house sold I put some of the money into savings/bonds with Leeds Building Society and the rest into NS&I because the full sum would be protected rather than 'just' £85k - and because just setting up those two sets of accounts took days and a huge amount of stress. However, the planned rate cut means I'm really not comfortable leaving it sat there any longer. 
Dad doesn't have passport or drivers licence but I can get a proof of address letter from the Home if needed (I had to do that for Leeds Building Society as most of his post comes to me). Has anyone any experience of doing this and can suggest banks/building societies who are more geared up to deal with this? 
Thanks

Vortigern

For proofs of address arrange to have some of his mail sent to the care home - bank statements, DWP letters. Consider applying for a passport. They're free for some older folk. Generate some correspondence with HMRC, a tax code enquiry?

I've found Paragon to be good for postal PoA applications. You can operate the account online and they have a range of instant access and term accounts.

Yorkshire Building Society and Santander have dedicated PoA teams. YBS is recommended by some.

Keith80

I found Barclays was fairly good with this kind of thing, but then my parent already had a current account with them and it was mainly a matter of establishing my POA credentials, and even then I may have been lucky in having been able to deal with a couple of particularly sympathetic members of the branch staff. Barclays savings rates aren't great, but then that may be less important for your purposes than ease of access (branch and online), higher daily faster payment limits, and so on.

turquoisespiff

Thank you both for replying. We found that post going to the home went astray which is why it's all redirected now. To add even more complexity my brother is dealing with the nursing home top-up fees and HMRC which means all post about that goes to him! Dad's main bank is Lloyds and they were pretty good about sorting out PoA, but have pretty much zero rates on savings. I've heard good reports of YBS from other sites so will contact them and have a look at Paragon too: Postal and online would suit me well.

xylophone

Relative had PoA for his late relative and operated accounts with Paragon, Barclays, Halifax, Yorkshire Bank, Virgin Money, Leeds BS, Investec and Coventry BS as well as stocks and shares accounts.

talexuser

I had POA for my Mum with Halifax sharedealing, Tesco, Sainsburys, West Brom, Coventry, Yorkshire and Lloyds, when they had good rates. I would not say it was easy, just possible.

Shedman

We found Family Building Society, Cynergy Bank and Secure Trust Bank (although not sure whether Secure Trust are still accepting new PoAs) pretty straightforward to setup using POA.  We also looked at Hodge Bank, Paragon and Hampshire Trust Bank.  Unfortunately the range of banks that have decent rates and will accept PoAs has diminished significantly since 2018 when we first had to set things up and none of the top payers, particular the Sharia ones, seem to accept PoAs.