Dear LPG,  

I want to tell a story and the point will become apparent if you bear with me.

I started work on my eighteenth birthday with the department of health and social security and I got paid cash in those days as did most workers. 

Not long after that I decided to go back to technical college and give up working for about a year while I re-sat my English and Maths ‘O’ level exams (do you remember the GCE?). 

I then did this and that in offices, in the days when it was really easy to change office jobs in central London, and for a while I worked for a Job agency and managed to find myself a job while I was there.  Things ran smoothly for a while but then I got married, had a child and started working for the GPO.  I was a telephone operator and all GPO staff had to be paid into a National Giro bank account because the GPO owned that bank at the time.  

I decided to have another account a bit later and chose the Alliance and Leicester building society.  I went to a lot of trouble to keep my accounts in separate banks only to find that at the turn of the century National Girobank were taken over by the alliance and Leicester bank and my accounts were in the one bank in spite of my efforts to keep them separate.   

In my continued quest to have some of my money separate I thought I would open a savings account a few years later and chose the Abbey National to do that so that my new account would remain completely separate from the other two, but then Santander took over and swallowed up both the Abbey National and Alliance and Leicester.

Now that I am older and getting a little less mobile I became resolved to leaving my funds where they are and that was fine until the end of June when Santander decided to close both its Forest Hill and Sydenham branches while the Lewisham and Catford ones remain open at the other end of the borough.  I am sure that I am not the only Santander customer who feels this to be unfair because it has left me and many others who live in these sections of Lewisham borough forced to make the choice of getting to either Catford, Lewisham or Beckenham in order to get their banking done.  I have read Santander’s reasons for the closures and I hope that LPG will add this information at the bottom of my letter.

I suppose I will be labelled ignorant and old fashioned because I like to see the person who is following my banking instructions when I give them out, but it appears to me that it is always the little people that suffer.

VT. Sydenham.

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