Tracy McGuire-Brown said that to make the process ‘so difficult and so insensitive is just appalling’.
A woman has told how it took nearly six years to receive £2,000 in Premium Bonds from NS&I after her father died.
Tracy McGuire-Brown, from Newbury in Berkshire, said she had a “very long and drawn-out” experience dealing with NS&I, eventually receiving what she was entitled to last month.
She said her father died in 2020 and “after he died, obviously there were a lot of affairs to sort out and we knew he had some Premium Bonds”.
The 61-year-old said NS&I was contacted several times but initially said there was no such account, “even though we gave all the details and more and explained the situation”.
“Finally in 2024, we started to get some movement that there was an account and eventually they said yes there was and then it started.”
She told the Press Association she sent various documents by post, adding “there would be weeks in between” and “still it went on”.
The former care home manager said she eventually received a letter suggesting that before the money was used she should pay off any debts or funeral expenses. She added: “My father had been dead five years by then, I just found that was the final insult.”
After complaining, she received £150 “to say sorry for all the expenses that I’d had, but that doesn’t cover the distress, the time, you know, and it was £2,000, we weren’t talking hundreds of thousands… it was just ridiculous, it was a horrible time”.
She added: “Really, should it be that difficult, that awful and that much of a trial?
“It’s just frightening, really. To make it so difficult and so insensitive is just appalling, I think.
“The weeks that passed by in between and the hoops that you had to jump through.
“Even when you have got all the information and you give them all the information, my experience was appalling… to the extent that I definitely would not invest in Premium Bonds now.
“And that’s a shame… when you are dealing with the bereavement of a close relative, to have this just keep going on, it just rakes stuff up as well, you just want to sort it, that’s all.”
She highlighted continuity issues in the process when she was speaking to NS&I staff, “so if you did get to speak to someone you had to explain everything again and again and again, just really bad”.
On Thursday, it emerged that NS&I, which is backed by the Treasury, is preparing to pay out hundreds of millions of pounds after failures meant that bereaved families were missing out on savings pots.
Pensions minister Torsten Bell said NS&I has reviewed more than 34 million customer records.
He said: “That work is ongoing, but it points to a maximum of around 37,500 customers with up to £476 million in deposits being affected.
“Three-quarters of cases relate to the period between 2008 and 2025.”
He said this number is likely to fall “but while it represents less than 0.2% of NS&I’s customers, it is still far too many”.
NS&I has said families, beneficiaries and deceased customers’ estates do not need to take immediate action and it will contact estates that are affected and publish further information for the beneficiaries of those estates.
