This I think is review 1000. I insure my cars with this company. It's a rare company these days…read morevery rare. It works. It does does what it says on the tin and there's no crap. When I have needed their services they have always been excellent. I dealt with a young chap in here this morning and the joy of face to face business is a delight. He was pleasant, effective and efficient. He will have RSI in years to come. I know what he had to do for me. To me it was straightforward but he must have keyed the computer keys over 100 times. I was really surprised that this seeming inefficiency isn't ironed out. Insurance costs have gone through the roof here. In my case like so many more than doubled for our vehicles despite thankfully no accidents. There are a few factors that brought about the huge increases including but not only Brexit but the right wing lunatics who lied their way through the vote which resulted in leave. Now UK PLC is notably poorer and running on fumes (ironically in London trying to make money from fumes these days) as it is being asset stripped every second of every day while these lunatics like J Rees Smug are grinning and keeping a low profile. I've no doubt they have benefitted hugely financially from an already rich base and that's all that mattered to them. The working poor that voted to leave in the hope of a few crumbs from the top political table now find they were duped as they have been time out of number and the few crumbs that they were getting have become fewer. What beggars belief is they never seem to learn.

I rarely go into banks and I've never knowingly met a bank manager either socially or…read moreprofessionally. And I see no reason to break the habit of a lifetime. In fact as I think about it I've never withdrawn money from a hole in the wall using a credit card either. I'd heard that this town centre place has a coin counting machine so if you've accumulated a lot of coins you push a few buttons chuck in all your coins and it counts impressively quickly and gives you a print out credit note. Then you need to have an account or a relative with same. For me it's the latter as they must lodge the money on the credit note and withdraw it to avoid money laundering legislation. Well that's the theory. It didn't quite work out that way as the machine was already full of coins so it only counted a small part of what I'd accumulated at home and on screen it froze and said go get an assistant. The assistant didn't keep me waiting any time at all but it became tedious with her repeatedly pushing on screen buttons, opening and closing the machine and restarting the machine only for it to count very few coins and stop again. So after 10 minutes of this unsatisfactory process we each became fed up. When told the machine was full and they had to wait for Securicor to arrive to empty and re set which mightn't be today I said I'd try again next week. That'll have me in a bank twice in a week or about the number of times I've been in a bank in the last 10 or more years. I'd say the machine counted the coins that it did count in well under a minute but had I to sort and count it would have taken me many hours. The staff are all mega helpful and a cheery bunch. Oh and a word about our stupid politicians who devise stupid legislation that even if you only get five pounds via coin lodgement it still must be lodged into an account to be paid out meanwhile real criminals can money launder tens of millions of pounds undetected. I mean about two years ago here one of the biggest money laundering scams - a dodgy exchange bureau- that had gone on for years was right next door to a police station. Ya couldn't make it up.

The over the counter service is ok - no more than that. It's rare not to have to queue for your own…read moremoney and if staff can push you to the self service machines they'll do so. I'm not impressed either with the inability to meet a financial advisor face to face with Wu flu being the excuse to push this on line also. The fact is that there's no real benefit having money in Santander and the rest of the banks/building societies as the interest rates are flat to the floor with negative rates and likely charges just to bank your money on the horizon. The fact is Santander acquired me as a saver - as I had been with the Alliance & Leicester building society when they bought it over - and while I'm normally sanguine about the current financial mess we are all in within Europe it does grate to see multi millionaires Ant & Dec being overpaid to front Santander in the UK with their emetic bland brand of alleged humour. Time to go elsewhere me thinks as bankrolling millionaires doesn't sit well.