Kate Constable said it took more than a year to claim £46,000 in premium bonds belonging to her late mother, after a process she described as “more than a year of hell”. The family’s claim took 14 months in total, including nine months spent waiting for probate.
Constable said the process felt “impossible to deal with” and added: “They only deal in paper … No one can tell you anything helpful. It’s hugely frustrating. The money is my dad’s inheritance. He has Alzheimer’s and is in a care home. We had to take out a loan to cover his fees.”
Her experience lands as NS&I acknowledges long-running problems tracing accounts belonging to customers who had died, leaving 34,000 bereaved families owed £367 million. A more thorough search process was introduced at the start of this year, but Sir Jim Harra said this week that it “takes longer than before, and has, unfortunately resulted in delays to current and new claims”.
The change matters because bereavement enquiries now take eight weeks to answer rather than the usual fortnight, and every claim still has to begin with a form, the account details and supporting documents sent in by post. NS&I will also ask for a death certificate, proof of identity and, where the savings pot is above £5,000, probate first under its rules.
That threshold is well below the £50,000 limit at Barclays and Hargreaves Lansdown, and it comes on top of a process that official figures suggest can already take five weeks on average. In this case, probate alone took nine months of the 14-month claim. The gap between the formal rule and the practical delay is what has left families like Constable’s stuck in the middle.
NS&I’s tracing failures concern accounts belonging to customers who had died, and bonds are only entered into the monthly prize draw for a year after death. Premium bonds, held by about 24 million people, sit at the centre of one of the UK’s biggest savings businesses, with tax-free prizes ranging from £25 to £1 million. That scale is why missed accounts can add up so fast.
It is not clear exactly what went wrong in the tracing process, but experts say paper-based premium bonds, or other accounts opened in the 1950s and 1960s, may have been missed. Duncan Stevens said: “We’re seeing the perfect storm of what happens when old data, historic system migrations and a high burden of proof collide.”
The problem now is not just the backlog. It is whether a system built around paper, postage and proof can handle the dead accounts it failed to find in the first place.
