I recall years and years ago… in BHS… I tried to open an account and was refused. I was mortified … this happened in the store with folk milling around me. The salesperson explained that it wasn’t a refusal because of bad-finances but simply because I was an unknown in the Credit world. Huh… my cheeks burned and I fled the store.
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A credit record will contain much more than credit cards. Current accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, mobile phone accounts and potentially anything at all that you pay for in instalments, for example if you choose to pay your council tax, electricity, home or car insurance monthly then usually ‘car insurance credit ltd’ will pay ‘car insurance Ltd’ the annual fee, then your monthly payments will be to ‘car insurance credit Ltd’. It also includes of course whether you’re on the electoral register at the address which allows you more often than not to not have to provide proof of address for things these days as they can just check the address you give them. Of course if there’s no activity at all for a number of years they will delete the profile which may be what happened here, or what often happens and maybe the case in @hairbear’s case is that there’s an address issue at the CRA’s side that means they can’t ‘find’ you. If this is the case you’ll usually find that one of the 3 CRAs will have it wrong, and it unfortunately just happens to be the one that the company uses. Clearly I have no idea of the actual reason why it happened, but I’m willing to bet that if the credit card (and all other financial ties to the U.K.) was closed less than 6 years ago there is a record, it’s just that no one wants to do the work to find out what the issue is and correct it.
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Ah OK.
I have to say that that is why I prefer the French system of being asked to produce your own “proofs”, to the UK system where your records are checked without you being involved. Of course there are drawbacks, it is hassle and you end up providing the same documents time after time but at least you feel you are in control of the process, and I prefer that. It was apparently the same with the CdS process, in France we had to provide certain documents and people complained about the hassle, but in the UK applications for settled status were apparently being rejected because for whatever reason records were not found. I can imagine you would feel very helpless in that situation. I am afraid that I do not trust computers not to “lose” me.
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It certainly has it’s downsides, yes, but at the same time the reason things like passport renewal is so easy is because they make use of CRAs to check the information you give them. I can’t imagine what renewing a passport from abroad would have been like previously but it’s because all the government systems join up, and also connect to CRAs that they can know that you’re you when you apply rather than some criminal gang or such. Several people on here who have said they’ve recently been through the process have commented how quick and easy the process was, and that’s because they have so much data to hand to verify that everything is above board. Every pro has a con, so I’m not at all suggesting I think it’s ideal, but there are certainly many pros.
I have accounts with two free online banks, Boursorama and Fortuneo. Boursorama I think is better, more user friendly - for instance when I pay in a cheque or make a credit card purchase it sends me a mobile message to let me know the cheque has cleared. Very simple easy to use interface.
No, just to have a credit record.
It’s not so much the fact that you paid off the debt at the end of the month, as the fact that you didn’t use it much which gives you a low score.
If you want a good credit score it helps to start with a high income, preferably with the same employer for many years, being on the electoral roll is a must and being a home owner helps enormously. After that a record of using, but regularly paying back, a loan of some sort or credit card shows that you manage your finances and is a plus point. Absolutely don’t have CCJs or other rulings against you for non-payment (of anything).
It is, perhaps, counter intuitive that the system assumes that you are not creditworthy just because it has no record of you - but most people with little credit history will be young and will have none of the things listed above - so it is perhaps not so illogical from the financial industry’s point of view.
Attitudes to credit have changed, some 80% of the world’s money supply is created as a result of debt, the gold standard is long gone and even fiat is out of fashion in favour of allowing banks to simply drum up money from thin air when they lend.
France is rather behind the times here and the banks take a patriarchal view which I think a lot of Brits might be uncomfortable with - that said, given the collapse of 2007 was due to unserviceable debt, perhaps France is right to be cautious.
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Correct Billy Butcher. The way France is doing it is good for what we have ahead. I’d just like a small, actual credit card to be available
On the subject of being off the gold standard and fiat ie government currency having money printed (which I think will end in something worse than 1929, no matter what the so-called “modern economists” say, I find it very funny that anyone would say cryptocurrency is worthless.
Crypto currency is a bad Ponzi scheme.
And fiat currencies?
@hairbear’s issue is however an underlining of what others have said previously about keeping some sort of financial products open in the U.K. if there is even the remotest chance you may need to open new ones in the future, be it because of pensions, investments or such or moving back, even if part time. As long as you’ve got a credit record, and can provide some sort of U.K. address you should in theory be fine to open new bank accounts or utilities accounts, it’s often when people close every thing down when they leave the country, are gone several years, and then return that they find they can’t do anything as due to data protection after so many years of inactivity the CRAs have deleted the entire file and you effectively don’t exist to them. Keep something open, a current account, credit card, anything that will keep reporting to the CRAs, and it will be much easier to pick up where you left off so to speak if you need to.
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As I said above:
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Paper money.
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Yes, 30 years with the same employer, very well paid, voted every time and a home owner continuously since 1987. I’ve just never done loans.
Except this has nothing to do with the financial industry. I just want to look up certain things on the Government Gateway, but they won’t let me as I don’t have a good enough credit history.
OK, you have to have been in debt at some point. They don’t seem to accept anything other than having borrowed money and payed it back, mortgages excepted.
It’s fairly mad, I agree but the various ratings agencies seem firmly wedded to the idea that, somehow, never needed credit = poor creditworthiness.
The system mostly works, except when it doesn’t such as cases like this or when they plain get it wrong and turn people’'s lives into nightmares.
And when it doesn’t work it seems there is almost never a simple way to fix it, and make sure it stays fixed.
Just noticed this article very similar to @hairbear’s issue with trying to get into government online services. Was particularly struck by this line
Extraordinarily, it claimed that only Northern Ireland driving licences were acceptable ID because the DVLA did not permit HMRC to access British drivers’ records. Why? Because, according to the DVLA, HMRC didn’t request access until a fortnight ago.
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Yes, stupid isn’t it. I was also told that it wasn’t enough to have the passport, you had to have a phone with nfc, load up an app on the phone, and then use nfc on the phone to read the chip on the passport. So if you didn’t have a smartphone with nfc, you were buggered.
lol, went into panic mode and have just checked my phone for nfc mode and it is there thank gawd!!!
This must disenfranchise thousands of people from accessing government services.
I bought a (cheap, used huawei) phone with NFC in 2020 in order to read the NFC chip in my passport so I could apply for UK settled status.
The other option was to take a day & visit a government office, but it was probably slightly cheaper to buy a used phone. And if I buy a French SIM card (to give me a ‘French’ number) then it’s also going to be useful to have it in a separate phone that can operate simultaneously alongside my usual one.
Trouble is, I’d only just bought a new phone a few weeks before. No NFC.
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We both have Xiaomi phones (Note 5, now 4 years old) and at the time NFC seemed like a frippery we’d never use, so pointless. Now I’d think differently, though I still wouldn’t use a phone to pay in a shop.