The Lemon Fool

Now answer me this dear lemons, if you'd have had a mortgage for 10/11 years from about 1991 through to about 2002 and you contacted your mortgage provider and said hello mortgage provider you might not remember me but I remember you (vaguely) and here's the thing, I've lost all my paperwork, can you remind me of my mortgage reference number? Would you expect them to have some sort of record of you on their computer systems? Well I have just done that and to my great surprise the Bank of Ireland (now something to do with the Bristol and West) have no record of me whatsoever. Not by surname, not by the address of the property they mortgaged for 10+ years. The operator was very apologetic and said it was quite an old system, but WHAT? REALLY? You have no record of me at all? There are systems out there that know what type of cheese I prefer and I've never even spoken to them, and here's a company that I had quite an intimate relationship with for 10+ years has no record of me whatsoever! Seriously! My next question was going to be did you flog me PPI (I suspect they did), am I being paranoid, or is that just a little suspicious?

In these days of "Data Protection", institutions have to justify why they are keeping old records longer than required for their business purposes. Halifax have said they keep data for 15 years after closure.

DrBunsenHoneydew wrote:In these days of "Data Protection", institutions have to justify why they are keeping old records longer than required for their business purposes.

Perhaps historians need to lobby for historic records not to be trashed. Much the same applies to anyone needing to "prove" or at least infer continued UK residence.

This is only going to get worse with the new GDPR regulations. In my work we are involved with a mass clear out of anything where the customer contract ended more than 24 months ago. The onus more and more will fall on the individual to keep records. This was not too bad in the old days, when we got sent statements every month, and most people tended to at least chuck them in a drawer. But with so many institutions now going paperless and only giving statements online, then these disappear when you close the account, so you should make sure to save local copies of these whenever possible.