How can I get official statements from NatWest?

Natwest are a joke lol :joy:

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 won’t 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 can’t NatWest do it lol :joy:

Is there anyway I can get A4 official copy of my bank statements with NatWest or am I out of luck :four_leaf_clover: and it can’t be done at all!

I keep being told it can be done but then the agent orders the wrong thing :sob:

Same issue is being encountered by someone on MSE forum, unless that’s you under another name.

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You guessed it that’s me lol :joy:

I still have no luck!

NatWest won’t provide official copy statements only A4 transaction list or A5 historic statements which my solicitor won’t accept

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Change your solicitor seems the easier option to me :man_shrugging:

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I’m afraid there’s 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 won’t fix your problem.

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My solicitor is fine!

They just following the rules! It’s NatWest that’s being a pain in the but

Why does the solicitor care whether it’s A5 landscape or A4 portrait?

Natwest Group shut down their statement printing operation last year, so you’re not going to get anything other than document in the format that it exists in on your online banking any more.

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Really why did they shut it down?

All my solicitor wants is official NatWest copy statements whether it’s A4 or A5 they don’t care!

They don’t want A4 transaction list or A5 historic statements they refuse to accept them!

Thanks for replying

Any statement except the current one is a historic statement, whether it be a copy or the original, so what exactly is the solicitor’s problem?

Nothing they will except original or official copies of my statements not transaction list or historic statements

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 you’ve been keeping paper copies of all your statements then eh?

As others have suggested, this sounds like the solicitors being the issue in being so inflexible not to accept official documents others would.

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They will accept official statements!

Just not A4 transaction lists!

Yeah it is a good job but I rather sent them copies but will use statements from my other banks

Aren’t statements from the app official? I’m 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.

Normally those produced in branch (including bank stamp) are acceptable where the paper type can’t be supplied for any reason.

Barclays even have an actual machine that produces them without human intervention.

I’d push back with your solicitor here.

It’s all sorted gonna use statements from my other banks so all good

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 ā€˜copy’ and have been rejected as ā€˜not the original’ 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 ā€˜because it’s not in English’ (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 don’t have) and a statement (no more than 3 months old, naturally) from a ā€˜proper’ bank. That was it. This has happened multiple times.

This attitude is widespread, and we really haven’t 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 it’s digital only, pair it with mandated acceptance by businesses.

Don’t hold your breath. Tony Blair’s 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.

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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 don’t see why that is an issue (the government had all the data anyways, just separately) but some people did.

We also didn’t have as robust data protection frameworks, and new arguments have been created since then.

  1. While you can argue a ā€œPapers Pleaseā€ society could arise, it’s 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.

  2. 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 ā€œnot having everything in one placeā€ has been overcome by the government already.

  3. We are more positive towards identity cards now (mentioned already, but this is probably the most important thing, so I’ll bullet it too).

  4. 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.

  5. 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: I’ve 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 isn’t reliant on being in good enough health to drive.

Furthermore, we can scrap the silly ā€œVoter 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, it’s actually easier for a foreign national to prove their RTW/RTR in the United Kingdom than a British national with no passport. (Driving licences aren’t actually possible to use IIRC because they don’t prove nationality).