Over £100 to change a name?! Any tips for lowering the price?

Phybersaur

(NOTE: I've changed the name on here for privacy reasons, but everything else is accurate. Also, I wasn't sure which board to post on; hopefully this is OK? )

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My mum is looking into changing/shortening her name:

• My mum was born Bethanie Rose Cunningham, and used this name for the first 19-20 years of her life, including with a pension company for a job she had in her mid-to-late-teens).
  
• She became estranged from her birth family when she was 16 and hasn't had any contact with them since. She mentioned this to her doctor in the early 90s and talked about wishing to change her name to fully distance/protect her from her birth family, and the doctor offered to update the name on her medical records there and then if she wanted to. She opted to change her family name, and from then onwards (around 1993) was known as Bethanie Rose White.
  
• She has since used this name everywhere; she has bank accounts, store cards, etc. in this name, and her children's birth certificates list her as "Bethanie Rose WHITE otherwise Bethanie Rose CUNNINGHAM", so there is plenty of evidence for this change of name dating back over 25 years.
• Last year, she was sorting out finances and tried to update her pension details to her new name, but they have asked for an Enrolled Deed Poll.
  

We looked into getting an enrolled deed poll completed but it would require £42.44 for the processing of the form, as well a signature from a solicitor (we were quoted £50 + VAT for this signature), which comes to ~£100 altogether, which seems very steep (and which, either way, is currently not affordable to us ).

Is there a more affordable alternative to this? We have thought about writing a normal (non-enrolled) deed poll and asking if that would be OK to use if we were able to provide evidence of the name change having happened and the new name being active for over 25 years, but we aren't sure how to phrase that kind of question.

(Also last year, she said that she would to do away with her middle name and shorten her first name so that she would just be Beth White (people call her Beth not Bethany anyway), but we aren't sure if this would also require an enrolled deed poll for other companies since it's just a shortening of the first name and removal of the middle name rather than a complete change of name?)

sheramber

It does not have to be a solicitor
The Statutory Declaration for adults must be completed by:
• A person who is not a near relative of yours or your spouse or civil partner
• A Commonwealth or British Citizen (as defined above)
• A person who has known you for no less than 10 years
• A house holder (this is required to prove the person is a permanent resident within the United Kingdom).

 

TBagpuss

£50 for a stat dec is wrong. The normal fee is £5 + £2 for any additional documents (from memory there aren't any on a deed poll) 
Try another solicitor solicitor and make clear you just need to do a statutory declaration.

Spendless

I can't answer about costs re her original surname change, but I would say it would be pointless to pay out for an additional change to be Beth White. The huge majority of people do not use their middle names and many people including one of my own children are known by the abbreviated version of their full name. Someone called say Susan Alice Brown will probably be known to the majority of people as Sue Brown and she would probably only use her full name on official documents

boots_babe

Given that you've said she changed her name as a protection from her family, I strongly suggest that you edit your post to remove her old and new names. Maybe replace the with some made up ones. Otherwise anyone searching the internet would be able to make the connection.

Tokmon

boots_babe said:

Given that you've said she changed her name as a protection from her family, I strongly suggest that you edit your post to remove her old and new names. Maybe replace the with some made up ones. Otherwise anyone searching the internet would be able to make the connection.

The first line of their post says that they have changed the names to made up ones...