A mother in Worcestershire set up NatWest First Saver accounts for her grandchildren at birth, paying in monthly to build university funds. The accounts are held in trust until the children turn 18. The grandmother is now in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease. Her daughter holds registered financial power of attorney. Both grandchildren need the money now — one already at university, the other starting this month. The combined balance: £20,000. For the best part of a year, NatWest's staff could not figure out how to process a power of attorney against trust-held children's savings accounts. Multiple call centre agents and branch employees gave contradictory and, in one case, grotesque advice: set up online banking in the incapacitated mother's name without consent, request a sub-£1,000 payment to sidestep the problem, or — the lowest point — that resolution would be "easier if my mother were dead." The family took out a bank loan to cover the first daughter's university expenses while NatWest fumbled. This is a straightforward extraction event: a bank's internal process failure forced a customer to borrow money that already belonged to her children, paying interest on funds that were sitting in the bank's own accounts earning the bank margin. NatWest's response is revealing in its blandness. It blames "lack of colleague awareness" of a "complex process." But this is not a complex process. Power of attorney is one of the most common legal instruments in an ageing society. The UK has over 6 million registered lasting powers of attorney. If your front-line staff across an entire year cannot navigate this, the problem is systemic, not individual. The bank says "learning from your experience" will "inform future improvements." This is corporate language for: we had no functioning training programme for a routine legal scenario that will only become more common as the population ages. The children now have access to their funds, and compensation has been paid — but only after Guardian intervention. The structural failure here is worth naming precisely. Trust accounts for minors plus power of attorney for an incapacitated trustor is a foreseeable combination in a country where dementia affects nearly one million people. Banks that cannot process this intersection are not providing a banking service — they are warehousing money while extracting optionality from vulnerable families. The deeper question is how many other families are stuck in the same limbo without a newspaper column to escalate to. NatWest's admission that "numerous colleagues" across call centres and branches failed over months suggests the knowledge gap is institution-wide. Every day that money sat frozen, NatWest held the float and the family held the debt.
