US Edition
Barclays has closed the account of a GP practice leaving doctors fearing their patients lives could be put “at risk”.
Orchard Surgery in Royston, Hertfordshire, has been shut out of its accounts for more than two weeks, cutting it off from vital NHS funding and rendering it unable to buy patients’ medicine or pay staff over Christmas.
The surgery, which has banked with Barclays for more than 20 years, had its accounts closed after failing to respond to requests to renew out-of-date signatures on its banking mandate, which raised a security flag.
Sarah Smith, a senior GP and partner at Orchard Surgery, said that the closure had “completely held up the functioning” of the surgery.
She said: “If our NHS money won’t come into the account, then we face difficulty paying the staff. We can’t pay the staff if we don’t have an open bank account.
“We run a dispensary pharmacy here and we have bills running into the thousands each month. Potentially it puts patients’ lives at risk if we can’t get the medicine to them.”
Banks have come under pressure to reevaluate the way they exit customers in the wake of the Nigel Farage debanking scandal. The Chancellor announced last month that the notice period for terminating payment services will be extended from two months to 90 days and banks will be obliged to provide customers with clear reasons for closing their accounts.
Dr Smith said the surgery first learned its bank account had ceased operating when it was contacted by a drug supplier who said a regular payment for medicine had not been made.
Doctors were then informed on November 10 that their account would be reopened within 10 working days, but have not been given a set date from the bank.
Dr Smith added: “Even after all this is resolved it’s going to be a lot of work to deal with the aftermath of this.
“The patients pay for their prescriptions on credit and debit cards and those monies won’t have been coming into the account.
“We’ve got to then chase those payments up again [and] that impacts on the patients and that’s annoying for them.”
The surgery, which has more than 8,000 patients, had been in the process of updating the names listed on its banking mandate with Barclays after a request from the bank in mid-October.
Barclays said that it had made repeated attempts to contact the surgery between January 2022 to October 2023 asking it to provide the signatures for its banking mandate and that this was a regulatory requirement.
However, Dr Smith said the surgery became aware of the issue after initially thinking the texts and emails from Barclays were scams.
They subsequently contacted the bank to check and began the process of updating the mandate.
Dr Smith said the surgery sent the requested signatures of its doctors to the bank on October 30 via recorded delivery, but that it received another letter from the bank requesting a further doctor’s signature on November 2, by which time the account had already been closed.
The NHS offered to step in to support Orchard Surgery with an emergency bridging loan, but Dr Smith said that they would have no bank account to which it could be made out.
A spokesman for Barclays said: “We acknowledge the challenges faced by our customer in obtaining the information needed in order to update the account mandate. We are required to keep up to date information regarding our customers’ accounts, as part of our ongoing responsibility to help prevent financial crime, and to meet our regulatory obligations.
“This process was complicated for our client due to changes of the partnership members over a passage of time which was not communicated to Barclays. In cases where we do not receive a response with up-to-date account information, we will proceed with the application of card blocks and account restrictions, ahead of issuing final closure arrangements.
“The mandate on the account has now been updated and the reopening of the business accounts has already commenced and will be finalised shortly. We accept that on this occasion more could have been done to help our customer and a resolution has been agreed with a redress payment offered for the inconvenience caused.”