Paula

After almost 40 years of banking with Lloyds, I'll be closing my mother's account on her behalf and will be moving the money to another bank. The last five years have seen the closure of all branches near us, and the introduction of the most useless online, telephone and customer services I've ever experienced. The only way you can get your money out of them now is by robbing one of the few branches they have left! I would give them zero stars if I could. They deserve to go out of business.

Another excellent job by Interflora. I've used them about ten times now, and they are the one service in the UK that I have total faith in. The flowers were lovely, looked just like the photo in the online catalogue, and were a very reasonable price. The delivery was on time and without problem (DPD are a good courier service). Will be using them again next month for my mother's birthday.

No problems at all with the delivery from Interflora to my uncle. They sent me pre- and post-delivery emails, and the courier, Genc, was very polite according to the care home staff. The flowers arrived on time and in perfect condition. By far the best courier service I've used in Derby (some of the other courier services are absolutely awful, and your goods turn up looking like someone has played football with them, if they even arrive at all). Thanks very much, DPD.

I'm the POA for my elderly mother, and Lloyds have been unable to get her bank statements to me for the last seven months. I've complained about this more times than I can count by now, but the person on the telephone banking line has blamed the postal service rather than the bank. I pointed out to her that all other letters, including other types of letters from Lloyds, HAVE got to me, and it's only the bank statements that haven't, but she wouldn't accept responsibility. Instead, she said she'd order a one-off letter that would state my mother's current bank balance, but almost two months later, that hasn't arrived either.

As the local council need my mother's bank statements to work out the contributions to her care fees, this is causing us a lot of problems. We've even suggested to the bank that the rep from the local council could call in at the main branch with ID and written permission from me to pick up a copy of her bank statement, but the bank point-blank refused, citing "customer confidentiality", even with permission from the POA and knowing that the council has to know my mother's financial details. This is totally unacceptable, and I'm livid. As I'm abroad ATM, I can't go in to see them in person yet, but when I DO go over in the next few months, they're first on my list of visits for a showdown.

Luckily, the lady in the council finance department used to work for Lloyds herself, and she is very sympathetic. She told me that they were crap then, so nothing they do surprises her.

I'm my mother's POA because she lacks capacity. As such, I oversee her Lloyds bank account from abroad. I'm currently faced with a serious problem regarding access to my mother's bank statements, which may result in her being kicked out of her care home.

In order to authorize local council payments for my mother's care home fees, the council's finance department need to see her bank statements. Until this February, they were being posted to me without any problems, but then they stopped. I have phoned Lloyds repeatedly in the last 6 months to reorder them, but they still haven't arrived. The staff in the telephone banking section have been very apologetic on the phone, and have done their best, but still nothing has happened. They were unaware that the bank statements appear to have been outsourced to a company in Germany - I know this because that was the postal address on the ones which did arrive. I might add here that the telephone banking itself has been outsourced to a company in Belfast.

As a last resort, I'm going to have to try to set up an appointment with a designated person from the local council finance department to go and pick up printed copies of mum's statements from the only branch still open in my home town. I haven't phoned the telephone banking people about this yet, but I can guarantee they won't be able to tell me if this is possible or, if it is, they won't know how to arrange it. I can't even phone the branch in my hometown directly anymore, as all calls are redirected to a call centre that can never help with any problem.

I now recognise that all the issues I've had with Lloyds over the years aren't due to the staff; it's mostly a problem with the bank having decentralized operations and outsourced individual services to unconnected companies who have no direct communication with each other. It's not just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing - it's more a case of the left hand not knowing that the right hand exists. It's a failure of the system as a whole - they have systems in place, but they are only within departments and aren't integrated with those of their other departments.

Technology was supposed to make life easier, but in this case it could make my mother's life come to a complete stop.

There are other problems in addition to this, and the main one is a lack of training. Because I live abroad, I can't use their online banking service - I can only use their telephone banking. The people on the phone in the TB section are all lovely, but only one of them I've spoken to has been trained in how to process transactions for customers who 1) live overseas and 2) are POAs - with all the other TB staff, *I* have had to explain to them what to type into the database to access the accounts for both 1 and 2. Not only that, they have all been unaware that overseas customers can't use their online banking.

The in-branch staff are also poorly trained. Last year, their supposed “POA expert” wouldn’t accept the official stamped and verified copies of my POA because she wrongly believed I had to produce the original POA that was in the solicitor’s safe. Thankfully, she was corrected by someone higher up.

A big thank you to Clare from Belfast in the telephone banking section for dealing so smoothly with a complicated transaction for me. I really appreciate it - thank you!

I ordered an item on eBay which was delivered to the wrong address by the courier. I contacted the courier who told me to contact the seller and leave them (the seller and courier) to resolve the issue between themselves and organise the redelivery. Time passed and I heard nothing, so I opened a case with eBay, who looked into the case and told me I didn't qualify for a refund because the seller had confirmed delivery. What!? DELIVERY CONFIRMATION MEANS NOTHING IF IT'S TO THE WRONG ADDRESS!

Coming here today, I'm even more disgusted to see that eBay don't answer any complaints - I guess that's because they'd need to employ so many people to respond to the sh*tload of criticism on here that they'd go bankrupt overnight. Well, eBay, you haven't heard the last of this. I won't be effed over by anybody.

Sent my mum an Interflora Christmas delivery. Excellent in all aspects as usual. Thanks very much.

My mum is in a care home and needed new footwear because her legs have swelled up due to cellulitis. I ordered some footwear from eBay, and the seller uses Evri. Everything went okay until the actual delivery. I got an email and photo telling me the parcel had been delivered. The photo was of the parcel crammed into the letter box of a front door, and I could immediately tell it wasn't the front door of the care home.

I sent the photo to the care home, and they got back to me saying they'd identified the door as number 28 across the road. (The care home is #29, and it clearly said so on the order). Unfortunately the occupant of #28 had already sent the parcel back.

I sent Evri a one-star review and complaint, and the bot claimed I'd be contacted within 24 hours, but I've had no reply. I've just wasted time trying to contact you via your useless bot chat box. As usual with chats, it asks you irrelevant questions that don't help, so I gave up.

Your service is rubbish. Your courier clearly couldn't be bothered to walk down the driveway to #29, as it is set back from the road, so they just shoved the parcel into the letter box of #28 instead and left. No doubt they assumed the occupant of #28 would do their job for them and take the parcel there - well, they didn't. So now my 84yo mother has no footwear, all because of your lazy employee. I wouldn't be surprised if the contents (if they EVER arrive) are damaged as well, as they were crammed into a narrow letter box.

Having read the cut-and-paste replies from "Kimberly" to the other one-star reviews on here, I know there is zero chance of getting any resolution from you on Trustpilot either, but I just hope people read this and avoid using you.

Your courier service and customer service are both terrible. Your customers deserve so much better and you deserve to go bankrupt.

Dec. 23rd Update: I had a generic email from Evri Customer Services saying they'd escalate my complaint and if I hadn't heard from them again after ten days (I haven't - quelle surprise) I should get in touch with the seller, with whom they'll liaise directly. I'm not holding my breath. Don't use this courier.

Jan. 4th update: Still no parcel. Both eBay and the seller have refused to refund my money, so now all three of you are in my bad books. If you think this is the last you've heard of this, you can think again. I have zero tolerance for being ripped off by charlatans.

Great job again. I'm a regular customer, and this birthday order for my mum was a nice arrangement and delivered with no problems. Thanks very much.

My mother, who has dementia, had an appointment at the Royal Derby Hospital on October 30th for a liver ultrasound. As she lacks capacity, someone from her local GP surgery accompanied her to the hospital, and told me that they'd let me know the result of the scan. It turns out that they weren't able to do the scan because my mum was too agitated; however, I wasn't informed of this. I only found out yesterday because I asked one of the nurses at mum's care home to go through her medical records to see if they had received the scan result yet.

This comes just two weeks after NHSE "mislaid" my mother for two days, leaving it to the care home staff and me to ring around the hospitals in the area, trying to find which one she'd been admitted to. It seems like there is zero communication between departments in NHSE and the organisations they deal with. In this case, the blame must lie with the GP surgery. I don't know if this is down to staff shortages, their crap and slow computer system, staff apathy or a combination of all of them, but whatever the reason, the NHSE admin system, whether it be at GP surgeries, hospitals, the ambulance service or wherever, isn't fit for purpose. I wonder how many people have died so far due to its failings.

Edit: I've just seen a copy of an email sent by the Royal Derby to my mother's GP practice which reveals what went wrong at the hospital; the surgery didn't inform the hospital when they made the appointment for the liver scan that my mother had dementia, so the technician was alone and unable to cope with my mum's distress and lack of cooperation. The person who wrote the email sounded as p***ed off as I am, and I don't blame them; It's not rocket science - it's common sense that you're going to need several members of staff to be able to carry out any type of procedure on a dementia patient. The quality of NHSE admin staff seems to be at an all-time low across the board.

Yet another NHS nightmare. My mother's care home contacted me to say she'd been taken to the Royal Derby Hospital by ambulance. When I finally managed to get through on the phone, the RD said she wasn't on the admissions computer. This was the start of a TWO-DAY search for her by myself and the care home staff.

It turned out that the ambulance had been diverted from the RD to another hospital, but no one at the RD had made a record of that, or where she had been diverted to, so we tried Queen's Medical and Burton Hospitals before finally tracking her down in the Chesterfield. All this took two days because of the number of times the phones rang out, or we were cut off after the call was answered.

In addition, I even tried the East Midlands' Ambulance Service, thinking they'd have records of where she'd been taken. I phoned them and it turned out they did, but they wouldn't tell me due to patient confidentiality. The woman on the phone said I'd have to fill in an application form and email it to them along with a scan of my POA. I told her my mother would be on a tray in the morgue by the time they received that. She told me she was sorry, but it was protocol.

When I finally got through to the Durrant Ward in Chesterfield, the nurses and doctor were lovely and very willing to talk and give me a full run-down on mum's health condition. Five stars to them.

The one star is for what is now a normal situation with NHS hospital admissions: if you don't go to the hospital with your relative, you can count on having to wait at least 24 hours before you can even find out where they are, let alone their condition. It was the same in April, when I didn't know if my mum was alive or dead for 24 hours after being sent to the Royal Derby with a suspected stroke. It seems that whoever should be notifying relatives or care home staff of the location of the admitted patient aren't bothering to do it, which is disgusting. We shouldn't have to act as detectives trying to track down where patients are.

I previously gave Key2care a 5-star review. They had been looking after my mum in the UK. I live in Japan and due to Covid, poor health, etc. I hadn't been able to actually visit my mum in all the time K2C were looking after her, but my impression of them from abroad, via phone and email, was excellent, hence the 5-star review. Initially, they were visiting her twice a day to administer meds, but over time this was increased to four visits a day, so I was confident she was being well looked after. How wrong I was.

In April, everything changed. Mum was hospitalised, and on discharge they assessed her as no longer being able to live at home, so she went into a care facility. When I was finally well enough to go over and start clearing out her house, I was totally unprepared for what I found. When I entered, a rank smell hit me. The whole downstairs was festooned with cobwebs, live and dead spiders and dead flies. There were mouse droppings over the entire floor and most of the furniture. The living room floor was crawling with flying ants.

The downstairs was bad, but upstairs was a nightmare. Over the next few days, as I started to clear out the house, I discovered the cause of the smell: my mother had stuffed dirty clothes and soiled underwear everywhere - in cupboards, the wardrobe, under her bed, etc. The clothes smelt as if they had been worn for weeks and you can imagine the stench from the soiled underwear. In these bundles of clothes I found dead mice. This is where they had been nesting. I also discovered used tissues and toilet paper stuffed inside drawers, ornaments, pot plants - everywhere you could imagine. There were even pairs of used blue vinyl gloves everywhere, and I realised these must have been the carers' PPE that they'd put in the bin and my mum had taken out again and hoarded.

I was shocked, disgusted and very upset and angry to think that my mother had been living in these conditions even though she'd been getting care visits FOUR TIMES A DAY. It's been claimed the animal and insect infestation happened after she went into the home, but I don't believe for a minute it could have got so bad in so short a period of time. I have kept hamsters and mice as pets for years, so I know how much they sh!t! There is absolutely no excuse for the company to have allowed my mother to live in such disgusting conditions. I can't believe that with four people going in every day, NO ONE noticed the hoarded filth, especially as the smell was overpowering. In fact, I now have reason to believe that the carers did report it, but the management did nothing.

I'd like to add that on the day my mum was admitted to hospital, the K2C management didn't inform me. Even though it was one of their carers who found mum on the floor and called an ambulance, then called K2C, it was mum's neighbour who got in touch. When I emailed the K2C manager, she acted as if it was no big deal. In fact, as soon as my mother was no longer on their books as a paying client, the previously lovely communication with the management ceased abruptly. That mail from the manager was the last I ever received from them. They didn't even get in touch to ask how mum was - I got text messages from some of her carers asking after her, but nothing from the management. It was as if as soon as she was no longer a paying customer, they didn't give a damn. That was after about 2 years of caring for her.

I know some of the carers really tried their best (and the 2 stars here go to them), but the management were only interested in money and I suspect they ignored any reports from the carers on the state of mum's house because it was cheaper and more convenient for them to do so.

I feel so bad now that I trusted these people to look after her. When I have engaged a new solicitor, I shall be talking about options for legal action regarding neglect and endangering my mother's health.

Another ridiculous NHSE experience.

I visited my mother's GP surgery to order a letter from the doctor. I explained very clearly to the receptionist that my mother had dementia and in order to use the POA I had, I needed a letter from her GP confirming that she had lost capacity. The receptionist talked all around the houses and finished by telling me that to protect patient confidentiality, I may need to get my mother to fill out a form giving me permission to ask for the letter. When I pointed out the bloody obvious - i.e. that my mother lacked the capacity to fill out a form giving me permission to apply for a letter confirming she had lost capacity, the receptionist said there was a way around it - I could get the letter if I could produce a valid POA document! At this point, I realised I might as well be talking to a pot-plant and left. Can NHSE get any worse? I doubt it. Mind you, it's the same with private clinics - is it the systems which are to blame, or are their employees thicker than a whale omelette? I really can't tell anymore.

I'm pleased to be able to leave a good review for Lloyds for once. God knows, I've left enough bad reviews for them.

I've just had a good experience with the telephone banking people. It wasn't five-star because of the number of times they had to transfer me to different departments and the time I was on the phone (40 min), but someone finally sorted out the issues I've been having with using telephone banking 1) from abroad and 2) as POA for my mother. The guy on the phone (who didn't want to be named in the review) worked out that the reason my mother's banking transactions weren't going through was that her Flexible Savings account was so outdated that the computer couldn't process it. He advised me to transfer money into her Classic account and try to pay from there, and it worked. With his help, I then transferred all of my mother's money from the FS account to the Classic, and hopefully, this will avoid future problems.

BTW, you should give your telephone banking staff and your staff in general more training on how to deal with customers who live overseas or are acting POA for relatives. After 4 years it's become clear that the average Lloyds employee has no clue whatsoever about either - even those who are supposedly "experts" in those fields. Some of the situations I've found myself in over these years have made me want to cough up blood.

Another five-star review for Interflora. This time for the pot plant sent for my uncle's birthday. No problems at all and he loved it. Thanks again from a long-term, repeat customer.

I had trouble working out how to fill in my claim for a train delay refund, but the staff on Twitter support answered my message immediately and helped me fill the form in really quickly. I was also impressed because it was on a Sunday as well. Great customer support. Thanks.

I reserved a ticket on the July 27th bus from Gatwick Airport to Derby. The bus turned up at the airport on time, but right from the start, the driver was aggressive, seemed in a very bad mood, and told myself and the other 3 passengers something about Victoria that we could not understand (as he wasn't a native speaker of English).

The bus set off through central London, which I know well from having lived there, and I recognised we were going to Victoris Bus Station. I assumed we were making an extra stop to pick up passengers, but no - instead, the driver unloaded our luggage in a car park, pointed in the direction of the bus station, told us to go there for another bus, then drove off! He literally abandoned us in a car park!

Myself and the other passengers (a lady from Nigeria and her two kids) made our way to the bus station, which though only a 5-minute walk, was exhausting in the heat and with a lot of luggage. The station was packed, and when we went to the Megabus office, the man there explained that due to demonstrations in central London, many of the roads were closed and all of the traffic in and out of London was severely disrupted. In the end, we had to wait hours in the bus station until they could get us onto another bus.

Obviously, the traffic problem wasn't the fault of Megabus, and both the man in the ticket office and the driver of the second bus (when it finally came) were both very nice. The issue I have is with the first bus driver who was so rude, and whoever it was (either that driver or his manager) who decided that instead of informing us of the full situation with the traffic disruption when the bus arrived at Gatwick Airport, we would be taken to and dumped at Victoria Bus Station without explanation. If the situation had been explained while we were still at Gatwick, I wouldn't have boarded the bus - instead, I'd have checked into the hotel at Gatwick North Terminal and traveled up to Derby the next day, as by that time I'd already been traveling for 33 hours straight without sleep and was completely exhausted. By not informing us of the situation, the driver deprived us of the ability to make that choice. I'm 56 and not in good health at the best of times. As it was, I felt so ill after being dumped at Victoria Bus Station that I honestly felt like I was going to collapse. The heat was unbearable because for security reasons, they kept all the doors closed unless a bus was actually boarding, and it was so crowded that there was nowhere to sit.

I won't be using Megabus again. I don't want to risk repeating that nightmare trip.

Edit: I forgot to add that even though I paid extra to book a front row seat, the driver told me I couldn't sit there - he had all his belongings strewn over the front two rows and made us sit in the middle. It seems from the reviews that a lot of passengers have had the same problem - they paid extra to reserve seats, then didn't get the seat they paid for.

Big thanks to Paul in telephone customer support today for making it so easy to close my mother's account. (She's got dementia and doesn't need a phone now). I only had to wait in the queue for 5 min too.

For those of you who live outside the UK and are needing to act as an attorney for a person who has lost mental capacity, this is how I did it. It's taken me 3.5 years to finally succeed. I hope this can help others avoid the nightmare I've had.

First, I took a copy of my POA for property and financial for my mother plus my passport to my local Lloyds. You do not need an appointment, but they need to have someone there who has the security code to do this task on the computer. The person scans the POA and passport, verifies them, and then sends them to the POA department. They give you a reference number, e.g. POA 12345, plus the telephone number of the POA department.

The next day, I had to ring the POA dept. to check to see if they had received the scans from the branch and if all the necessary documents had been sent. The man confirmed they had received everything they needed, but what he told me next turned out to be incorrect. Warning - if they tell you that they will send you a banking card, THIS IS NOT CORRECT. (Two separate POA reps told me this, but they were wrong). The truth is that if you live overseas, you cannot use online banking, you will have to use telephone banking FOR WHICH THERE IS NO CARD.

(I'll omit the three weeks of useless waiting for a card that never came here.)

The next step for telephone banking is you need to set this up on the phone. The number I used from abroad was 01044 345 300 0071. before you ring them, you need to have ready:
1) your cell phone number with the international code for your country from the UK
2) a copy of your POA
3) a copy of the bank statement with the sort code, account number, etc. on it.
4) the POA 12345 ref. number

Ring the number, explain the situation and that you want to set up a telephone banking account. They will ask for the POA ref #, ask you some ID questions, then ask for your phone number. They will then send a 5-digit verification code to your phone. Once you receive it, you tell them the number. They then ask you questions about the POA document - the date it was registered and the address of the solicitor. Once you have answered those questions correctly, they will send an 8-digit number to your phone, which you again confirm. This 8-digit number is important, as once you have that, you don't need to go through the whole process again if they accidentally hang up on you - instead, you can just ring them back, and using the 8-digit code, pick up where you left off.

The final step is to register your password. This password must be 6-10 characters long, isn't case sensitive, and can't contain special characters. To do this, the person you are talking to (and who knows all your account details) will transfer your call to another person at the password interface (who doesn't know anything about you or the account details). When that person answers the phone, you say ONLY YOUR PASSWORD. The person will then spell it back to you to check it, you say "correct". They say thank you and hang up. In this way, no one at the bank knows your account details AND your password, so your account is secure.

When you ring the telephone banking section for a transaction, tell them immediately that you live abroad. You then tell them your surname, first name, date of birth and country. Their computer will show them just 2 random characters of your password, so they might ask you, "What are the 1st and 4th characters?" You tell them, then instruct them in the transaction.

Good luck. The lady told me today that it is very rare for Lloyds to have overseas attorneys, so most POA reps don't know the correct procedure. This is true. I also got cut off three times while they were trying to transfer me to the password reg. I was on the phone for 90 min in total. None of that was in a queue - it was all talking to people.

Thank god it's done. I just hope it works now!