Get your partner’s body home? Will he ring us at NatWest?
Ms J.T. writes: In April, I was on holiday in Tenerife with my partner when he suffered a massive heart attack and died. After getting myself back home, I needed to bring him home so I contacted his bank, NatWest, as his account included travel insurance. I supplied his death certificate, but a month later I checked his emails and there were endless messages from NatWest, asking him to get in touch about his claim. I emailed and called, reminding the bank that the claim was for the £3,000-plus cost of bringing his body back, and unfortunately the dead body could not contact them.
YOU might think that you had gone far enough by reminding them, but no. Letters began to arrive from NatWest, all addressed to your dead partner, asking him to make contact. You gave me one that was sent to him in June, saying: ‘We’ve tried to contact you as we need some information to progress your claim. Please give us a call.’
Tried to contact you! For heaven’s sake – what were they using? A medium? A ouija board?
You called the bank again and again, and eventually you said you wanted to make an official complaint. The result? Another letter urging your late partner to get in touch!
All this was from the travel insurance side of the business. Meanwhile, NatWest’s banking operation was fine. It closed your partner’s account and sent you the balance as you are the executor of his estate.
The closest you got to an explanation was in one of your many phone calls to NatWest. When you explained once more that there was no point in asking a dead man to give them a call, the speaker told you that emails and letters were automatically generated and ‘the computer settings could not be altered’.
You told me that the whole episode was a macabre version of the Little Britain sketch, with you insisting that your partner was dead and could not give them a ring, and NatWest insisting: ‘Computer says no!’
When I contacted them, officials at NatWest’s head office were mortified. You very quickly received a call from the chief executive’s office, apologising repeatedly.
Apart from meeting the insurance claim for £3,476 in undertakers’ fees and transport costs, the bank said it would pay £400 into your account to settle your complaint.
This missed the point though. Your complaint was never about compensation. What was offensive and distressing was what you described to me as ‘the brick wall’ of trying to deal with NatWest staff who ignored common sense in favour of software stupidity that meant they never had to make a real decision and could blame their computer for everything. What you really wanted was changes within NatWest and an assurance that the same thing could not happen to someone else in the future.
I can now give you this. The bank has told me from a high level: ‘We sincerely apologise to our customer. We made a number of mistakes and incorrect information was given at a very distressing time.
‘This absolutely cannot happen again and we have taken steps to ensure that proper care and attention is given in the future.’