Church and State blog: NatWest Bank: Declan responds to the Financial Ombudsman's final decision for their website. Pixsy continues to chase payment for the past non-commercial use of one image on the Church and State website

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

NatWest Bank: Declan responds to the Financial Ombudsman's final decision for their website. Pixsy continues to chase payment for the past non-commercial use of one image on the Church and State website

Our Church and State website has no less than 59 Nobel Laureates on it despite the never-ending assault on our email; see paragraph 2 under "Church and State" on this blog's sidebar (updated today).

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group Headquarters in Gogarburn. The RBS owns National Westminster Plc (NatWest).

Declan has had RBS's NatWest before the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) since February 2020 following the non-payment of his salary by standing order. The Financial Ombudsman has effectively found that the Executive Case Manager at RBS wouldn't have been reasonably aware when she paid Declan £100 compensation on 17 February 2020 - in recognition of issues he had experienced in setting up two replacement standing orders on the Network for Church Monitoring business account - that there had been some error previously made by NatWest in setting up the replacement standing order for the payment of his salary (an additional £75 was paid on 18 March 2020). Declan's complaint about the subsequent cancellation of the standing order without his knowledge or consent that resulted in the non-payment of his salary on 24 February 2020 was passed by the investigator to the Ombudsman in October 2020. His salary continues to be paid by manual transfer. Below is his response this evening to Ombudsman Cathy Bovan's final decision. She is the former Team Manager at FOS and has held roles at Alliance and Leicester (now Santander). Declan's response was addressed to the investigator and copied to RBS CEO Alison Rose for her information:

On Tue, 26 Jan 2021 at 18:25, Declan Heavey wrote:
For the attention of Alison Rose, Chief Executive, The Royal Bank of Scotland Group

Pritti Darbar
Investigator
Financial Ombudsman Service

Address removed for email

26 January 2021

Dear Ms Darbar,

Thank you for the Financial Ombudsman's final decision about, inter alia, the cancellation of the standing order without my permission that resulted in the non-payment of my salary on 24 February 2020. Please find my completed reply form attached. The form only allows me to indicate whether or not I accept the decision, so I provide my reasons for not accepting the decision in this covering email for all parties involved.

In a final decision dated 26 January 2021, an ombudsman concludes that National Westminster Plc (NatWest) has already paid £175 in recognition of the issues of setting up the said standing order and thinks that represents fair settlement to my complaint.

On 25 February 2020, I submitted my complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). I then had to wait almost eight months before I received NatWest's explanation (citing "some error") for why my salary wasn't paid the day previous. I only first received this explanation via FOS on 8 October 2020, more than four months after NatWest had paid the £175 in total mentioned above.

I did not receive a response directly from NatWest to this aspect of my complaint, which they say had been sent to me on 12 March 2020 via Royal Mail. I believe that it is noteworthy that an additional £75 was not paid until 18 March 2020 in furtherance of this response. NatWest's letter states: "Due to the distress and inconvenience this issue has caused, I have credited your account ending 400 with the sum of £75.00" (emphasis added).

As I stated in my response to the ombudsman's provisional decision, it seems clear from the timeline that NatWest could have updated FOS far sooner than they did that they had responded in March 2020 to my complaint about the non-payment of my salary the month previous. I think this falls short of the service they ought to have provided at the time, but this is not sufficiently accounted for in the ombudsman's decision in my view.

My salary continues to be paid by manual transfer. Please let me know when the ombudsman's final decision is published on your website.

Yours sincerely,

Declan Heavey
Managing Director
Network for Church Monitoring

FOS investigator: "NatWest have said although the cancellation was processed on the 12th February 2020, it wasn't uploaded for processing until later – so it didn't actually cancel until the 19 February 2020."

The FOS investigator (not the ombudsman) wrote that "when the executive team wrote to you, they wouldn't have been reasonably aware a cancellation was in the system and would've seen two standing orders set up - one for your [sic] and one for your wife". This is that email from RBS Executive Case Manager Mandy Durkin:

On Mon, 17 Feb 2020 at 17:02, Durkin, Mandy (Executive Response Team) wrote:
Our Ref: PHO-0264121920
17 February 2020

Dear Mr Heavey

Re: Network for Church Monitoring Ltd.

Thank you for your recent emails addressed to Alison Rose, our Chief Executive. Alison has passed your correspondence to me and asked that I contact you on her behalf.

Please accept my apologies for the recent issues and poor service you have described in connection with setting up replacement standing orders. You have outlined that the instructions were taken incorrectly by Tom McKeon on your initial visit to NatWest Stratford Broadway Branch on 11 February 2020 and that you have had need to duplicate the request and visited another branch as a result.

I have discussed your concerns with Tom, who conveyed his apologies and confirmed that he had set up the instruction incorrectly and not verified the payment frequency. Regrettably, this failure has initiated your subsequent follow up contacts to the bank in order to seek correcting actions. I am sorry for the administration errors and lack of support you've described receiving. From my review of bank records I can confirm that the correcting actions are now completed in full.

All previous lapsed and incorrect standing orders have been cancelled. There are now two remaining active standing orders that have been set up as you requested, one payable to yourself and one payable to Mrs Heavey, for the amount of £140 fortnightly. The instructions are set up with an initial payment date of 24 February 2020 and a final payment date of 8 February 2021, against the reference *****400.

I am genuinely sorry for the trouble and frustration we have caused you. While there is no substitute for getting things right first time, I have credited £100 compensation to account number ending *400 in recognition of your time, travel costs and inconvenience in this case.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention and allowing me the opportunity to address your concerns. I trust that these actions have resolved matters for you. Please don't hesitate to contact me should you have any further questions or queries in this regard.

Although I hope it won't be necessary, I am obliged to advise you that you have the right to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, free of charge – but you must do so within six months of the date of this email. If you do not refer your complaint in time, the Ombudsman will not have our permission to consider your complaint and so will only be able to do so in very limited circumstances (for example, if the Ombudsman believes that the delay was as a result of exceptional circumstances). Further information about the service is available in their leaflet http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/consumer-leaflet.htm and on their website www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk

Yours sincerely

Mandy

Mandy Durkin | Executive Case Manager| Customer Service & Operations | Commercial Banking

For months we experienced an almost total blockade of our emails to prominent space advocates anywhere in the world (only the latest targeted group). That blockade extended to an offer of financial help to us personally last month. We continue to have problems getting emails through to a close colleague in Washington, DC. Declan's use of his mobile phone to try to get my permission emails through to prominent space advocates has also proven unsuccessful. On both recent occasions the leading expert could only be reached through voice mail because, we assume, of the pandemic that is still raging in America. Most recently, we have had the honour of listing a Hall of Famer astronaut among our Honorary Associates. It was one of the few emails that we have gotten through to prominent space advocates since last September. (A distinction is made here between a prominent space advocate and someone who has written an article about space travel. I do get some permission emails through to space writers, but regrettably not very many and only occasionally.)

23 December 2020: The blockade of Church and State emails extends to the sabotage of an offer of financial help to us personally. Pixsy with their outrageous Third Notice threaten our Church and State website. And Declan's primary laptop targeted this afternoon

I am truly appalled by the unlawful violation of the Heavey's basic right to send and receive email without interference. I would be most grateful for anything you may be able to do by way of taking measures to correct this gross abuse.

An American professor to then Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone in 2010

From My Picks:

26 January: Pixsy (day 77): I have found Declan's Motion to Dismiss to fight their threatened court action in an article titled "Defense Against the Dark Arts of Copyright Trolling". No sooner had we heard from them than they were named and shamed by Computer Weekly and it's a truly sickening read (updated daily)

Our list of 287 Honorary Associates includes 17 Nobel Prize laureates, 11 US National Medal of Science laureates and 12 knighted professors notwithstanding the excessive targeting of these three categories of emails in particular.

http://churchandstate.org.uk/honorary-associates/

"Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out." Edd Doerr (1930-2020), (then) President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

Church and State blog

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

NatWest Bank: Declan responds to the Financial Ombudsman's final decision for their website. Pixsy continues to chase payment for the past non-commercial use of one image on the Church and State website

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