The Post Office needs delivery of common sense

A.B. writes: I have over the past few years operated online savings accounts with the Post Office on behalf of my mother under a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA). Once the letters ‘LPA’ arise, it seems all common sense is lost and a total lack of understanding exists, none more so than with the Post Office’s processing centre in Armagh.

YOUR mother has vascular dementia and lives in a nursing home. The whole point of the Lasting Power of Attorney is to allow you to administer her savings of over £500,000 so that her life – and yours – can run as smoothly as possible.

In 2017, you invested £75,000 for your mother in a one-year account operated by the Post Office and its partner the Bank of Ireland. The Post Office lost the certified copy of the LPA that it held and you had to go through the whole application process again. You even had to get confirmation that the solicitor who certified the original LPA was a genuine lawyer.

So, when that account approached maturity late last year, it should have been a simple matter t o roll over t he £75,000 to a new account, still with the Post Office. Instead, you were told to start the whole process again.

Bizarrely, when you moved house at the same time and gave your new address, the response from the Post Office was to write to your mother at your old address, noting that she had now moved there from her nursing home. You were then told that your mother had to confirm your own address and provide certified proof of your identity. These were details the Post Office already held, but – with steam coming out of your ears, you told me – you gave the Post Office what it wanted.

The Post Office seemed totally out of its depth, with a complete failure to understand your mother’s situation. Officials wrote to her again, this time noting that she had – apparently – moved from your old address to your new one, with no mention of the nursing home where she actually lives.

You finally made a formal complaint. The Post Office’s response was to write once more to your mother, demanding that she supply a letter from the nursing home showing her full name and other details. Or, the Post Office said, it would accept a nursing home invoice as long as it showed your mother’s date of birth and the date she entered the home.

All the information it needed was of course already held by the Post Office. All you were trying to do was move your mother’s savings from one of its accounts to another. You told me: ‘I am fairly resilient but am now at my wits’ end with this awful and time-consuming mess.’

I took all of this up with the Post Office. I can quite understand why a new LPA needs to be checked carefully, just in case one member of a family is ripping off another. But in your case, the Post Office had already carried out its checks once, if not twice.

Officials told me: ‘ We are incredibly sorry that Mr B and his mother have not received the kind of help and service we aim to provide to all our customers, particularly in what can be difficult and upsetting circumstances. Unfortunately, due to an administrative error, incorrect information was requested in order to register the Power of Attorney on Mrs B’s new account.’

Confusingly though, in an apologetic letter to you, the Post Office explained that money laundering rules meant it had to establish where the money came from for t he new account. Nobody seems to have noticed that the money was already in an existing Post Office account.

The outcome is t hat your mother’s new account is up and running, with interest backdated to last November, and the Post Office has offered £ 300 extra to make up for its errors.

While all this was going on, you separately opened a new account for your mother with one of the small challenger banks. The whole process took less than three weeks from start to finish.

If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.