Popcorn time!
Same route cause as last time would be a good bet.
NatWest customers have been informed that 600,000 transactions have gone missing, the latest debacle facing the IT gaffe-prone bank. On its Twitter profile this morning the bank, which is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, said: "Some customer payments are missing this morning, and we are investigating as a matter of urgency …
"We will ensure no customers are left out of pocket as a result of this issue.*”
On an obscure webpage in size 1 font in sub paragraph 72 in their TOS
*Customers left out of pocket need to claim within 3 minutes of being left out of pocket and turn up to the bank in a Banana suit and £100 for the admin fee
Whilst I cannot fault your logic, experience tells me that there are a lot of people who rely on a single bank account, through which all of their salary/tax credits/child benefit is paid.
This type of person is also unwilling (so as to avoid the temptation of spending money they don't have) or unable to get a credit card. Also, many operators of pre-payment charging systems for electricity meters will not accept credit cards. Drawing money out of a credit card at an ATM results in punitive credit charges. And many people do not keep significant amounts of cash lying around.
I have been caught in a situation where I could not get money from a bank because of a cock-up. There was a day where there was a backbone telecom failure in my home area, which resulted in all of the ATMs in the area becoming non-functional, and no shops could do any electronic transactions. I fortunately had folding money in my wallet, but I know of many people who were unable to do anything that day unless they had cash.
So contingencies are good, but there may come a time when even that becomes useless. Then, the only safe regime is cash!
I'd bet most non "1%ers" pay over £20 a month for their mobiles.
go to ee.co.uk. Biggest ad seems to be for "iPhone 5c WITH WIFI CALLING" for £21.99 a month. I saw another add for an S6 for 50 quid a month.
from what I can tell that's the sort of deal most people are on. I suspect your wife is very unusual in having a fully paid for mobile phone.
"go to ee.co.uk. Biggest ad seems to be for "iPhone 5c WITH WIFI CALLING" for £21.99 a month. I saw another add for an S6 for 50 quid a month."
Do you think the cellcos are likely to advertise what sells by the truckload but makes them little money, or what they'd like you to buy because its trendy and makes them truckloads of money now and in the future if they actually get you to sign up?
How many people do you think have PAYG mobiles these days? Other than business users, I don't know anybody that still has a contract mobile. Now maybe I'm unrepresentative, but you could be too.
"I suspect your wife is very unusual in having a fully paid for mobile phone."
Maybe, maybe not. Lots of people are on SIM only deals which implies contract-expired, bought outright or even second hand phones are more common than we may think. Now that some operators are separating out the HP agreement cost of the phone from the service contract, people are starting to notice the sometimes high cost of the phone and the "free" upgrade every two years.
"Whilst I cannot fault your logic, experience tells me that there are a lot of people who rely on a single bank account, through which all of their salary/tax credits/child benefit is paid."
...the issue isn't the bank account, but the lack of having budgeted adequately that you have no money AND no essentials - like electric/heat and food ... all kinds of stuff could happen preventing you getting money out that day, so having "a plan" wouldn't be a bad idea.
What part of "about one in five households receive tax credits" that I said earlier don't you understand.
These are mostly normal people, often with both adults in work, challenged by circumstance. Some may be deliberately playing the system, but most aren't. They are just relying on the system to provide what they're told they are entitled to, and using this income to plan their expenditure.
I don't know what you expect these people to do if their circumstances change for the worst. Once, they may well have been able to easily support three children. If they've lost income as a result of losing their jobs and having to move to lower paid ones, or accepting pay cuts in order to keep their jobs, the family breaking up or any of a number of different things, their financial situation could have got worse since they had the children.
Are you an advocate of turning the kids out of the home if you struggle to provide for them? The Victorian foundling homes and orphanages? The work house? Or maybe euthanize them? Come on, let us know.
We don't know this woman's situation, so don't just brand her a chav. because you're a smug bastard who has never been in that sort of situation. She may be in work and still be entitled to these tax credits.
Oh, and by the way. In order to achieve a stable population, what with non-reproducing members, it is necessary for some families to have more than two kids. Three is not only quite normal, but absolutely essential to compensate for people who die having never had children. IIRC, the average number of kids per couple needed to keep the population stable is regarded as somewhere between 2.3 and 2.4.
If everybody was forced to enter heterosexual relationships and have two kids, the population would still fall as a result of natural mortality and infertility. IIRC, the last two or three UK censuses show that discounting people who come in to the UK from abroad who are often young and have children while they are here, the UK population would be falling. And this has serious implications on government finances in the future.
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>"does make me wonder whether they made any effort to resolve their individual cases themselves before spamming the internet with their rants"
Companies seem to react faster to bad news posted on social media than to bad news communicated directly to them. Last month I tried to tell a major company that its website had a broken FAQ link. I used the "send a message" functionality on their website; they emailed back failing to understand the problem, so I phoned them and got the standard script: "What is your account number?" "I don't have a bloody account, I was trying to research whether to open one!"; and after three follow-up emails I gave up.
Maybe she can afford them, but relies too heavily on the services of other people to be able to get at her assets. This is looking like a personal vendetta, AC. Do you know her personally?
Lots of people don't have credit cards because they can't get them. Mainstream lenders nowadays are very risk averse, and will not give credit cards to people they think may not be able to afford them (this is what they are being told to do by the financial regulators).
Why do you think there are/were so many pay-day lenders about?
Get off your hight horse and look at the real world!
Her tax credit payment is part of her regular income. As such, she, along with many others, will rely on it to plan their spending. If she's on part-time working or a zero hours contract, it may be one of the few bits of regular income she gets. Why should she not rely on being able to draw on it once it's been paid.
Don't think that for these people, a tax credit is a bonus or a windfall. It's (again) regular, weekly or monthly income.
What the hell do you think she's supposed to use it for? A holiday!
Go talk to some real people rather than guessing at their circumstances.
Oh, and if you want to be regarded as distinct from all of the other myriad of AC posters, why not set up a meaningless handle and post under that. El Reg will still know who you are whether you post AC or not, but nobody else will. That way we can differentiate from all the ACs who post similar sounding comments.
I was thinking about why I was getting downvotes, and it occurred to me that there may be people who don't know what tax credits are in the UK.
They are basically part of the welfare system which is supposed to return tax to workers in low paid jobs, depending on their circumstances. This is supposed to encourage people to keep working in these low paid jobs, rather than giving up and moving to what used to be called unemployment benefit, now jobseekers allowance and income protection support.
The idea was that it would reduce the amount of money paid in benefit, but instead what it does is trap people in low paid jobs that they can't afford to give up, but which offer them no chance of improving.
In many cases, what this does, if treated at face value, is that low paid workers pay negative tax, meaning that not only do they not pay tax, but they get money back.
Something like 5,000,000 families in the UK receive some tax credits, according to government figures, and all households with children which do not have a higher rate tax payer will also receive child benefit.
It is part of the complex tax system that we have in the UK, as envisioned by that <irony>financial wizard</irony> Gordon Brown. I would prefer to see a system where people did not need this level of support (because it's regressive and unfair), and because what it really shows is that either wages are too low, or cost of living is too high in the UK for a significant part of the population.
So, as I said, tax credits are not a windfall, they are part of the regular income in about 1 in 5 of all households in the UK (based on the previous figure, and the total number of households in the UK). This is why it's important. Families rely on it's timely arrival for all sorts of things including food and fuel. That is why this woman is upset.