Old cheque from A&L

dianewatson

I have found an old cheque from Alliance and Leicester which dates from June 1999 which for some bizarre reason never got cashed. How can I now get the money owed to us on the cheque please as Alliance and Leicester no longer exist 

Aylesbury_Duck

You could try taking it to your bank to see if they'll accept it - no harm in trying, but I believe cheques expire after six months.
I think they got rolled into Santander, so I would contact them to see if they can help.  Have you got any correspondence to go with it, to say what it's for?

Were_Doomed

Was the cheque for a significant value? (Sometimes the effort isn't worth the reward).

Bear in mind that the value of that cheque will have at least halved in real terms over the past 20+ years.

davidmcn

What was the cheque for? If it was a share dividend then the share registrars would normally have kept the money aside for any uncashed cheques - though goodness knows whether that would now be Santander's share registrars you'd need to contact.

You sure you haven't already had the money paid to you since the date of the cheque?

Sandtree

As above, what is the cheque for? What comes up if you put the sort code into an online checker, a Santander branch?

Depending on what the cheque is for the person/company that sent it may be willing to give you a new one but the law of limitations which covers most things is for a maximum of 6 years and so in most cases you will be relying on goodwill rather than a consumer right. 

DiddyDavies

Aylesbury_Duck said:

You could try taking it to your bank to see if they'll accept it - no harm in trying, but I believe cheques expire after six months.

There isn't anything in any legislation that states cheques expire are any set period of time. It's simply that most banks state that they may choose to to accept ones that were dated more than 6 months previously.

The OP may well have already been paid for the money owed if at the time they thought that the original cheque hadn't arrived or had been lost and a replacement was sent out and this was subsequently cashed.

Ditzy_Mitzy

davidmcn said:

What was the cheque for? If it was a share dividend then the share registrars would normally have kept the money aside for any uncashed cheques - though goodness knows whether that would now be Santander's share registrars you'd need to contact.

You sure you haven't already had the money paid to you since the date of the cheque?

Oh and bear in mind that most shares and securities set a time limit on dividend claims.  I've seen twelve years quoted, but it can be as low as six for unit trust distributions.  This is possibly a unit trust distribution as, apparently, Alliance and Leicester ran such vehicles.  The unclaimed proceeds get reabsorbed.  After twenty one years the easiest course of action is probably to forget about it.  Alliance and Leicester Unit Trust Managers, separate to the bank, dissolved in 2013.  

Flight3287462

I've got a bank book with the National Commercial bank from 1963 with £4 2/3 in it, wonder what the chances are. 

CardinalWolsey

For a cheque that old, forget it. You need to go back to whoever wrote the cheque, and ask for it to be reissued (good luck with that).
With A&L not even existing anymore, there will be no current record of the account this was drawn against. It would fail clearing. Even if Santander decided to "give it a go", they would need to be able to demonstrate that they hadn't previously cleared the cheque. Regulatory retention of records does not require them to be able to retrieve data from that long ago. 
Put simply, you're out of time, out of luck.

lincroft1710

Hunyani_Flight_825 said:

I've got a bank book with the National Commercial bank from 1963 with £4 2/3 in it, wonder what the chances are. 

I worked for a bank in late 1960s and I don't remember that one although I do remember Martins, Glyn Mills, District, Hoare and Co, Williams Deacons. It appears National Commercial was a Scottish bank formed from a merger in 1959 but merged with the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1968/69, subsequently losing its identity. RBS which took over NatWest in 2000 has in 2020 been rebranded NatWest Group.

In 1963 £4/2/3d (£4.11 app) was a fair amount of money. I started work at the bank in 1968 on a salary which worked out at £8.65 per week