Retired couple Ray and Frances Dykstra exude loyalty. They have been married for 48 years and have spent their lives together in the village of Warboys, Cambridgeshire.
Until he retired, Ray was a dedicated employee of British Rail, starting as a clerk when steam trains were still running and working his way up to management level. Forty-three years of service.
The Dykstras, like many seniors, are also loyal when it comes to their finances. Throughout their marriage, they banked at HSBC (Midland as it was) and never had a desire to move.
Banking problems: retired couple Ray and Frances Dykstra
That is, until this month. “I first opened an account with them when I was 17,” says Frances, now 73.
‘My employer at the time, the Pru, stopped paying workers in cash and insisted that we all open a bank account. I went with Midland to Cambridge, where I worked.
He has had his Midland/HSBC account for 56 years and a joint HSBC account with Ray, 86, for 48.
In the early years the bank was brilliant and helped the couple get a mortgage on a house in Warboys.
“We knew the manager of the Huntingdon branch quite well,” Frances recalls, “and he took a great interest in our quest to buy a house.” He was a great help.’
It was only three years ago that his loyalty began to be tested. The first time was in July 2021, when he closed the Huntingdon branch. They were disappointed but comforted by the fact that they could use the HSBC branch in St Ives, a similar distance away.
But less than two years later, that too closed, meaning they had no choice but to travel to Cambridge or Peterborough to do their banking, both with 50-mile round trips.
Loyalty: During their marriage, Ray and Frances banked at HSBC (Midland as it was) and never had a desire to move.
“We don’t feel confident about online banking,” says Frances.
“We don’t trust it, so it’s very important to have a branch nearby.”
Over the past 14 months, the Dykstras have continued to fight HSBC. However, earlier this month they decided enough was enough.
This came after Ray went to use the Peterborough branch and discovered it was closed for renovations until next month.
An HSBC employee, sitting outside the branch, told him to use the Cambridge branch.
A couple of days later, after checking that the Cambridge branch would be open on a Saturday, he traveled into the city only to see a notice saying it had closed the day before for renovations.
It will not reopen until the end of next month. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, it said the nearest HSBC was now in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, 29 miles away, but 36 miles from the Dykstra home.
It was the last straw. The following Monday, Ray went to the Nationwide branch in Huntingdon and arranged the transfer of their joint account to the building society.
Frances, who loves spending time on her assignment, will maintain her own HSBC account, although she rarely uses it.
While it is good that HSBC is renovating branches rather than closing them, it should have thought more about how to implement its refurbishment programme.
Last week it said it was striving to stagger branch “upgrades” to avoid inconvenience to customers. He also said customers could use post offices for everyday transactions and indirectly apologized to the Dykstras.
However, the fact is that leaving long-standing customers without local access to banking services (even in the short term) is disrespectful.
The Dykstras deserved better.
Labor is on the right track by promising many more banking centers
Veteran community banking campaigner Derek French has scored another victory in his quest to establish banking centers on our high streets.
Derek, a former NatWest Bank executive, founded the Campaign for Community Banking Services (CCBS) 26 years ago amid a wave of branch closures, a wave no more brutal than Barclays’ decision to close 171 in a single day in April 2000.
It was Derek who first called for community branches that customers of all the big banks could use.
And although CCBS was dissolved before its call was heard, community banks are slowly popping up in urban centers where all banks have closed their branches. So far 56 are open and another 76 on the way.
Although Derek, now 80, is glad his idea has gained traction, he believes the current rules governing whether a city is eligible for a center are too restrictive.
You are absolutely right, as a result of the fact that it is the banks who dictate the terms under which the centers are established. To pay the bill, their inclination is to keep the number of centers low.
Ups and downs: The Labor Party may have nasty tricks up its sleeve when it comes to taxing our savings and wealth, but in banking centers its direction of travel makes a lot of sense.
Derek’s big complaint is that if a Nationwide branch is the last ‘bank’ in town, a center is not allowed even if the building society does not offer small business banking services.
This means that many cash-based businesses find it difficult to deposit their income without traveling further afield, which is a major inconvenience.
The Labor Party, it seems, has listened to Derek. A few days ago he promised to support the deployment of 350 centers in the next five years, relaxing the restrictions imposed by the banks.
With the regulator acting as its enforcer, Labor will stop banks from refusing to introduce centers in cities (currently 84) where Nationwide is the last ‘bank’.
It will also weaken conditions that unbanked cities must meet before being eligible for a hub, such as having a minimum population size.
This was the excuse used by banks when they refused to give the Peak District town of Bakewell a center after the closure of its NatWest branch left it bankless earlier this year. A ridiculous decision.
I visited the town before the NatWest closure and saw immediately that a bank was an integral part of the community jigsaw.
Labor may have nasty tricks up its sleeve when it comes to taxing our savings and wealth, but in banking hubs its direction of travel broadly makes sense.
The decision to make Gordon Brown a Companion of Honor in the King’s birthday honors has not been welcomed by everyone.
John Benson, from Dinas Powys, near Penarth, Glamorgan, is among the disgruntled brigade.
That’s because he holds Brown responsible for ruining his retirement and that of thousands of other former workers when they lost both their jobs and a large portion of their pensions in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The charge sheet is as follows. Firstly, as Chancellor in 1997, Brown launched a £5bn-a-year tax raid on defined benefit-based company pensions that marked the beginning of the end for such schemes.
Secondly, as a key figure in the Labor government, he and his ministerial colleagues did not act promptly when companies began to fail in the early 2000s, leaving pension companies in situ with insufficient assets to meet all his promises.
The affected workers felt they had been hung out to dry.
And finally, as Prime Minister, he oversaw the introduction of an inadequate “financial assistance scheme” that left people like John with a reduced pension (for life) and little protection against the ravages of inflation.
For the record, John dedicated 28 years of his working life to steelmaker ASW before it collapsed in 2002, leaving a gaping black hole in his pension fund in its wake.
“I’ve never been so angry,” John told me last week, referring to Mr. Brown’s honor. Understandable.
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