Halifax points the finger at customers

Halifax this week admitted a "systems failure" resulted in the bank writing to customers to falsely claim they had missed credit card payments and their card limits were to be reduced - by more than 90% in some cases.

Peter Ward a retired teacher from Liveredge in West Yorkshire, was surprised when he received a letter last week telling him that his account was overdue and the credit limit on his Halifax Platinum card was being cut from £6,500 to just £500.

"It's not a credit card I use all that often but I knew that I hadn't missed any payments. However, the more I thought about it the more concerned I became. I started to wonder if I had been the victim of card fraud, and more worryingly my wife started to cross-examine me about my spending patterns," he says.

When he contacted the bank he was told that the "missed payments" concerned the purchase of £154 worth of halal meat in Spain two and a half years ago.

"My wife had had her purse stolen while on holiday and although we had reported the theft within 20 minutes the thief had used the card to purchase the meat. After the holiday the matter was eventually resolved and the bank had agreed it was a fraudulent transaction. I thought that was the end of the matter, and it had been for two years, until now.

"The thing that annoyed me about this recent letter was the fact that Halifax insisted that I write to card services centre in Dumfries - they initially wouldn't resolve it over the phone.

"I have used the card in the past to make significant purchases, at least I wasn't turned away at a till trying to buy something."

A spokesman for Halifax admitted that a systems error has resulted in a "small batch" of customers receiving such letters, but insisted that it was not a widespread problem.

"As a responsible lender, we periodically review our customers spending habits and limits. This means that some customers have their credit limits raised, while others have them lowered. In this instance there was a systems failure that resulted in these letters going out to a small batch of cardholders.

"The computer wrongly identified the theft of Mrs Ward's card in Spain as a matter of concern and wrongly lowered the limit. This matter has been resolved and his credit limit restored.

"We accept that we made a mistake and as a gesture of goodwill and to apologise for any inconvenience caused to Mr Ward we have credited his account with £50," he says.

It's anyone's guess whether Halifax's singing frontman Howard would have made a song and dance about it all.