I am trying to order some paper statements as need them as buying a flat, But really struggling as every time I speak to NatWest all they have ordered for
me so far is A4 transaction list or A5 historic statements!
My solicitor wonāt accept A4 Transaction list A5 historic statements PDF/Printed copies will only accept official bank statements like you get monthly!
All other banks offer this why canāt NatWest do it lol
Is there anyway I can get A4 official copy of my bank statements with NatWest or am I out of luck and it canāt be done at all!
I keep being told it can be done but then the agent orders the wrong thing
Iām afraid thereās little advice beyond that from @Breezy.
The other forum is larger so you may get a broader range of suggestions there, but avoid getting drawn into a debate about banking behaviour. It wonāt fix your problem.
Why does the solicitor care whether itās A5 landscape or A4 portrait?
Natwest Group shut down their statement printing operation last year, so youāre not going to get anything other than document in the format that it exists in on your online banking any more.
At a guess - the volume of statements being produced meant it was no longer cost effective printing and shipping their own statements when compared against the cost of sending a simple PDF to an outsourced secure printing company.
Of course the amount of statements they send out will have been in freefall for a number of years and will only continue to fall.
Good job youāve been keeping paper copies of all your statements then eh?
Arenāt statements from the app official? Iām I missing something? They are even also being accepted by Home Office these days that used to be so rigid on paper statements from the bank.
I find this utterly pathetic that we are still relying on paper bank statements to prove identity in this day and age. Lots of my accounts are paper free, and I have found (before you all surge forward and advise me to ring up and ask said bank to send a paper copy) that such copies that are provided are usually watermarked ācopyā and have been rejected as ānot the originalā more than once. Likewise what were obviously printouts of PDFs sent by the bank being rejected.
To be fair, lots of the lack of acceptance is due to abysmal training and misunderstanding of staff, together with ignorance, fear of fraud and good old fashioned British prejudice - a school business manager rejected my German ID card as proof of address for a DBS check ābecause itās not in Englishā (it has an English translation underneath) despite the school and county guidance saying they, er, accepted EU ID cards.
All she would accept was a driving licence (which I donāt have) and a statement (no more than 3 months old, naturally) from a āproperā bank. That was it. This has happened multiple times.
This attitude is widespread, and we really havenāt moved on in the last 30 years.
Hopefully we get ID cards in Britain sometime - I also agree the current system is inefficient. Giving people ID cards is just the obvious fix. Even if itās digital only, pair it with mandated acceptance by businesses.
Donāt hold your breath. Tony Blairās government planned ID cards, but there was such an outcry that the idea was scrapped the second he left office, and no subsequent government has been interested.
Most people, (yes, I know not everybody) has a driving licence or a passport, and they serve as default ID for most situations. Some banks will even accept provisional driving licences.
Yes, I know. But we need to stop looking at things from the time Tony Blair was in office like that matters. The world has changed. Yougov Polling indicates that people are supportive of ID cards, today.
Furthermore, the Tony Blair system included the National Identity Register, which meant everything at some point would be linked together; personally I donāt see why that is an issue (the government had all the data anyways, just separately) but some people did.
We also didnāt have as robust data protection frameworks, and new arguments have been created since then.
While you can argue a āPapers Pleaseā society could arise, itās also worth mentioning that documentation protects legitimate individuals from the government. A national identity card is proof of your Right of Abode in the United Kingdom and upon presentation you avoid another Windrush due to lack of documentation.
The government is already creating the Gov.UK Wallet and Gov.UK single sign on, with the idea of data sharing between departments being a core tenet of the new interlinked governmental services; the argument of ānot having everything in one placeā has been overcome by the government already.
We are more positive towards identity cards now (mentioned already, but this is probably the most important thing, so Iāll bullet it too).
We can move everything into the digital space at the same time and improve our trust services. An example of this is great, Estonia uses these cards for literally everything. Contracts signed by private key encryption are much more fraud resistant than a signature.
Right to Work/Right to Rent now exist and people do fall through the cracks. Identity cards would stop that from happening ever again.
There are no real good arguments against it and the people who backed Starmer in the internal power struggle of the Labour Party were the ones to suggest the BritCard.
Edit: Iāve never seen anyone refuse a provisional as ID, for the record, but this is a pretty ableist or classist view that everyone is likely to be able to possess a driving licence or be in the position to have a passport. We should be provided with a photo identity document by the state for domestic use that isnāt reliant on being in good enough health to drive.
Furthermore, we can scrap the silly āVoter IDā scheme if we just had an identity card; we should have just extended BRPs to nationals instead of scrapping them.
As it stands today, itās actually easier for a foreign national to prove their RTW/RTR in the United Kingdom than a British national with no passport. (Driving licences arenāt actually possible to use IIRC because they donāt prove nationality).