A building society

Many years ago, mum & dad had their mortgage with a certain building society….for the sake of arguement, lets call it the Halifax.  When the mortgage was paid off, the account was left open in order that the halifax could provide storage for the deeds. This service was free of charge. The halifax also provided the house, buildings insurance policy and automatically renewed it every year. Every year, even after the mortgage was paid off, the halifax automatically added the cost of the insurance policy to the mortgage account. This meant that the mortgage account immediately acquired a debt, onto which the halifax applied an interest charge. This in turn, meant that the total payment for the simple insurance policy increased from a position of “uncompetitiveness” to even greater “uncompetitiveness”. 
Last year, upon discovey of this, Mary visited the local branch of the b/society to
(1) pay off the accumulated debt and
(2) instructed the b/society to cease with this proceedure. 
That was early last year, so a few months ago, aware that the policy was due for renewal at the end of the year and that most financial institution’s track record for remembering instructions given to one of their branches, was not particularly good, I wrote on behalf of mum, confirming that they should “on no account” add the insurance premium to the mortgage account.   But, to send a new quote and if they were competitive, mum would send a cheque to cover the premium  (the letter was signed by mum). 
Guess what ? early Dec. the halifax  wrote to say that they could not comply with mum’s instructions and it was their policy to continue to automatically debit the mortgage account. They further added that, if mum wished otherwise, she should contact them to instruct as such   ????!!!!####
What the bl##dy hell did they [Ms Gemma Sharpe, Customer Service representative] think the original letter was for in the first place ?  
I felt the urge to contact their help desk and ask why such an obvious, “job experience” girl was allowed to answer correspondence from clients, but have long realised that, if you get shirty with help desks, you get nowhere. So I rang them and although they agreed that mum’s letter was clearly an instrution to change their method of charging for the insurance, they further wished mum to ring them direct.  Luckily martin was visiting mum at the time and he rang them, with mum present, and cancelled the policy.  
Paddy, has since renewed the policy, online with another company, at a fraction of the halifax price

This entry was posted on 09/01/2008 at 02:35 pm and is filed under daily stuff, Having a moan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.