Last November, Lloyds Bank informed me, in my role as treasurer of my parish church, that the church account was to be closed and that I should open a new business account instead. This can only be done online, but a fault with their system prevented me \u2013 and local branch staff \u2013 from doing so.<\/p>\n
At the branch staff\u2019s suggestion, I opened the new account with a different bank in early March. Since then, I\u2019ve been trying in vain to get Lloyds to transfer the balance from the closed account.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been repeatedly told to visit my local branch and repeatedly told that the money would arrive within weeks. At one point I was told that the bank had lost my identity verification documents and so had put the case at the bottom of the pile.<\/p>\n
We are owed nearly \u00a35,500, which, for a congregation of 10 in a village of 60 houses, is a significant sum. We have had to borrow from parishioners to pay for essential repairs and to settle the electricity bill.<\/p>\n
CI, Yorkshire<\/p>\n
The apparent indifference of Lloyds is outrageous. As was its energy spurt when it realised public exposure was pending.<\/p>\n
As soon as I questioned its inertia, it winged off a mea culpa acknowledging poor and inconsistent communications and offering \u00a3400 in goodwill, plus \u00a396 in lost interest.<\/p>\n
What the letter from the executive complaints manager did not mention was the still-missing funds.<\/p>\n
So back I had to go to Lloyds, and off went another letter from the bank apologising for the omission.<\/p>\n
The money was transferred more than four months after the account was closed.<\/p>\n
A Lloyds spokesperson said: \u201cWe\u2019re sorry the customer had such a difficult experience. We should have handled things better.\u201d<\/p>\n
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com<\/a> or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last November, Lloyds Bank informed me, in my role as treasurer of my parish church, that the church…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-749040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}