House Bungling Halifax

Published on 2 March 2004 in House, banks, Halifax, house, house buying, mortgage

So things are progressing on the house front. The solicitors have got their cash, the survey was done on Friday (we’ll hear in the next few days) and a check on the Valuation Office Agency’s Council Tax page shows that the council tax band for the property is band C, which will mean lower council tax bills (our current, smaller flat is a band higher) which when added to that the fact that our insurance premiums look like they’ll be lower, is good news.

Unfortunatly the one stumbling block is the Halifax. After giving a heart-stopping moment on the phone the other day where they applied the wrong credit score and told us we could only borrow £20,000 less than they originally told us, they’ve screwed up again.

On Saturday we got the full list of details that we’d submitted to them as part of the application – it needed a few corrections, not least because Catherine had told me her salary wrong (it was actually a point more than she originally told me) but because they’d got my salary wrong. In fact they’d managed to put it into the system £2,000 more than I had told them. Impressive given that when I phoned up originally, we went through these things in minute detail to make sure it was right.

Great. Now they knocked off £3000 off what we could borrow. Thankfully with the addition into the equation of a performance bonus, it got down to about £250 off which at least is easier to handle.

Add to that that they’d got mine and Catherine’s professions the wrong way round as well and it just makes you wonder what on earth they’re doing in the Halifax’s call centre… Because taking care over an application doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Still not as bad as a blunder the Halifax did when I was about 14. Went into their Hyde branch with my passbook to withdraw some cash and the cashier looked at her computer, looked at me, and said "You’re not six months old, are you?". Especially impressive given I’d had account with them in my name since December 1977, when I was three months old.