Jeff Prestridge

Let’s not beat around the mulberry bush. Nationwide Building Society is a force for good in the murky world of personal finance. It is more consumer-centric than its banking rivals and believes in delivering customer service par excellence. Virtues sadly lacking across swathes of the financial world. It has even opened a new branch this year – Glastonbury in Somerset  – an unlikely but welcome step given most banks are retreating from the High Street at a great gallop. Also, unlike rivals – including the State-owned Royal Bank of Scotland - it does not believe that in order to run an efficient financial institution you have to outsource key parts of your business to distant parts of the globe.

It is not usually feasible to put the great and good of the financial services industry together in a room and get them to agree on anything. Typically, they squabble like alley cats, arguing about everything on and off the agenda, even  the state of the weather. Occasionally, blows are traded. Yet a few days ago, I witnessed something of a financial miracle taking place in a swanky restaurant (1 Lombard Street) in the heart of the City of London. Fourteen individuals, representing different areas of the pensions industry, actually agreeing on a pensions agenda that the next government should follow. I was taken aback as I chewed furiously away on my vegetarian sausages while swallowing gallons of black coffee. Miracles, not misselling, in the City of London? Whatever next?

I have always had a soft spot for building societies. Maybe it's because I worked for one in the 1980s as an economist. Bristol & West it was called, and long since gone to the cemetery for building societies (not many plots left). Lovely departmental boss, no work pressure and little economic analysis required. But it is more than a former work bond that draws me to these financial mutuals. More than 20 years of personal finance reporting have made me realise that most building societies strive to do more good than harm. They try and look after their customers - be they savers or borrowers. Some such as Nationwide, the biggest by far, even reward customer loyalty.

Back in the 1980s, when I was embarking on a lifetime of sweat, toil and tears in order to bring home the bacon, I lived in a pensions desert. I couldn’t see, feel or feed one (a pension, that is) for miles around. During this decade, against a backdrop of privatisations, a rampant Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher), Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Madonna’s virgins, I was privileged to work for four employers. A major chartered accountancy practice, a big and little publisher and a now defunct building society. Not one offered me the opportunity to save into a company pension.

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November. It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg. Higgins likes his taxis. He spent £18,000 swanning around London in them between March and October 2015. He also likes his reading. He’s a voracious absorber of anything from Robert Graves and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Raymond Carver. Hence the pile of papers. Children flick in and out of the breakfast room – he has six of them. Life could not be better. It is a lovely start to the weekend for the former Standard Life actuary who was paid £2.

Nuisance calls are the bane of my life - as are unprompted texts. They assault my mobile at all hours, night and day. I find the calls so annoying and invasive that I now leave my phone on permanent silent which kind of defeats the object of a mobile (I don’t have a landline at home). No wonder most of my friends have given up on me – ‘unsociable ginga, never answers his phone’. Of course, my mother, still as matriarchal as she was 50 years ago when I was wearing shorts,  isn’t impressed at all. Voicemail message one:  ‘Jeffrey, why didn’t you answer my last call?’ (Jeffrey, as opposed to Jeff, is a sure fire sign that mother is annoyed with me.) Voicemail message two: ‘Jeffrey, where have you been?

Poor customer service is endemic across swathes of British industry. It plagues some of our biggest companies and as customers we should not have to put up with it. After all, this is the UK, one of the richest countries in the world. Or am I wrong? It’s time, I say, to stand up, be counted and shout: ‘Poor service no more. Treat us as if you care, as if we are humans.’ Now that rant is off my chest, let me tell you about a recent personal experience. Early in August, I did the good fatherly thing by ordering a new Panasonic LED TV for my eldest son who had just moved into a flat in trendy Sheffield (he’s a fitness coach at Sheffield United Football Club). I bought it online at Currys PC World.

We are fast approaching a time when massive tracts of this fine country of ours (greenfield, brownfield, urban, rural) will be bank-free zones. Villages and towns stripped of their last bank. Goodbye pub, goodbye convenience store and now goodbye bank. Yes, ultimately goodbye community. Last week’s disappointing report from the Competition and Markets Authority on how to breathe fire into the static current account market will do little to arrest this decline in the bank branch. Its authors seem besotted with the digital age, prattling on about a future dominated by digital banking and open competition. It’s as if the bank branch was already a thing of the past.

Although a few uncertainties have been removed from the political landscape in recent days – hail Empress Regnant Theresa May – it would be a mistake to think that normality has now returned to the financial world. Far from it. Uncertainty rules. Sterling still treads the low – rather than the high – paths while the outlook for the economy remains at best fragile. The UK stock market may have risen like a phoenix and soared – eagle like – to an eleven month high with May’s imminent arrival at Number 10 but it still remains prone to ‘shocks’. Don’t rule out further short sharp corrections before the summer is out (did it ever start?) to send our pensions and ISAs into temporary freefall.

Sooner rather than later, George Osborne is going to have to come clean and tell us what he really wants to do with our pensions – the financial vehicles we and our employers painstakingly fund and that in theory should help us live out our retirement in a modicum of comfort. Will it be yet more tinkering as befits a Chancellor who has become known as the ‘Tinker Man of Pensions’ – the Government’s own version of footballing Tinker Man extraordinaire Claudio Ranieri ? Another restriction here and another rule change there. Or far more audaciously, will it be a radical overhaul of the tax incentives available to those who squirrel away money today so that they can enjoy a better tomorrow?

When Equitable Life is no more – and it won’t be long before the death bell tolls – there will be a belter of a book to be written about all the shenanigans that have taken place at the mutual. Although the savings institution goes back more than 250 years, it is the last 20 years that are the most entertaining and lurid. Over this period, customers’ savings have been pillaged, policyholder has been pitted against policyholder, greed and incompetence have shone in the boardroom (nothing new there, ed) and there have been love affairs at the highest level (a certain former chief executive falling in ravenous love with a secretary half his age).

No-one in their right mind would have willingly created the monster that is now the country’s current pension system. It has become the financial Hydra of modern day Britain. Bizarrely, it is deterring most of us from saving for retirement because we are intimidated by its many heads of poisonous anti-saving rules. Governments past and present – red, blue and in-between - are primarily to blame for turning what should be a saver’s friend into a foe. Greedy pension providers with their rapacious charges haven’t helped either. Politicians have meddled furiously, justifying it on the grounds that pension savers enjoy generous – and costly - tax privileges. In doing so, they have created this multi-headed savings beast that few of us trust or understand.