NS&I has admitted that long-running problems in tracing accounts belonging to customers who died have left 34,000 bereaved families owed £367m. The government-backed savings group has said the search process was fixed, but families trying to recover money are still facing a slower system that can stretch claims into months.
That is why Kate Constable’s case has drawn attention. Her family waited 14 months to recover £46,000 in premium bonds belonging to her late mother, with probate taking nine months of that time. For bereaved claimants, the process can feel less like a routine formality and more like a second ordeal, especially when the money is needed quickly to pay bills or settle an estate. NS&I says anyone making a claim must complete a form, provide account details, and usually send a death certificate and proof of identity, with a grant of probate sometimes required.
For many families, the delay begins with a simple question: whether NS&I can still find the account at all. The savings body says bereavement inquiries now take eight weeks rather than the usual fortnight, and the extra checks introduced at the start of this year have slowed both current and new claims. Under the rules, probate is required once the balance is above £5,000, a much lower threshold than the £50,000 limit used by large banks and wealth managers such as Barclays and Hargreaves Lansdown.
One reason the problem has proved so stubborn is the age and condition of the records. Premium bonds and other accounts opened in the 1950s and 1960s may have been missed in the tracing process, and Duncan Stevens said NS&I’s records will have moved through multiple systems and formats over more than 160 years. He described the situation as a collision between old data, historic system migrations and a high burden of proof. That matters because bonds are only entered into the prize draw for a year after a customer dies, and no interest is earned on holdings trapped in limbo for longer.
NS&I’s admission narrows one part of the story, but not the one families care about most. The search-process failures may be fixed, yet the new process is still slowing claims, and the open question is how many accounts from older paper records remain unidentified. Until those are found, the money stays where bereaved families cannot use it.
