Dear LPG

The other day I went to visit a close friend who happens to be blind.  I have known her since she was sighted and for some twelve years now I have been one of her exclusive band of trusted friends who visit and help her to get through her daily life, and all the little things that sighted people forget that they need their eyes for.

I sometimes take her to the bank or the shops, I often cook something for her and we eat together, and I also help her pay her bills.  This is what I was going to attempt on the day in question.  We have paid this bill before and Lewisham Council need to be paid.  We have always paid by telephone because, as all the information confirms, her sense of hearing is really acute and so she can be a bigger part of the process.  

It has always been a simple matter of making the call and then having the card details ready, but this time the advisor took the details needed to identify my friend and then told us that she would be transferring us to an automated paying system so that we could key in our bank details. 

I was not prepared for this really, and by the time I listened to the instructions and tried to key in the long card number it became quite a challenge.  I did it in the end but what a performance; it was so much easier when we just needed to read the details to the advisor, but that is now no longer acceptable because of security reasons.    The thought of having to battle with the keypad and all those numbers to pay this bill every time I do it in the future was not filling me with confidence!

Then I had one of those really perceptive moments and on our next visit to her bank we ordered a good old fashioned cheque book.  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  The banks and your payees will tell you that it takes ten days or more for a cheque to clear, but what they are not telling you is that each of those organisations have to actually employ extra people to deal with hand written cheques and, let’s face it, it is all about money for such agencies, but they are still a really good way of making sure that the job is done.

I remember when there was a move to get rid of cheques altogether by the banks.  I use them and I know a lot of people still do, especially the older citizens, and if we are to keep them we need to keep using them. 

 So please readers if you have a chequebook keep writing your cheques and sending them out to pay your bills, because the only way that we are going to prove they are needed is if we continue to use them occasionally.

SB,  Catford

It has to be said that the new method of keying lengthy sets of numbers through a keypad on your telephone gets harder to do accurately as we get older. LPG found evidence that the last time they tried to phase out the use of cheques as a way of payment was in 2009, and phasing them out in 2018 was rejected as a good idea recently.

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