UKC

Good afternoon to the collective wisdom of UKC!

I noticed recently my credit score bombed from fair/good down to poor seemingly for no reason and about the same time the Co-op bank closed my account without giving a reason, so I've been loojing into it a bit more. Turns out firstly that they're unrelated as the credit score looks to have gone down after the account issue - so Co-op=bastards plain and simple.

Back to the credit score, I've got a detailed reportand can see I'm getting a negative because I have 3 credit accounts opened in the last 3 months. This is British Gas x2 (gas and electric) and Yorkshire Water. (there's also the electoral roll as council lost my application and thne have been slow but that will show up in the next few weeks as I'm on it now).

Looking at those three, they were opened because I moved house ,but they're with companies I already had longer term contracts with from my previous address, but are (now electoral roll is sorted) the only bad things I've got and are crippling my score. Anyone know if it's possible to link the new and old contracts in some way to get around this as I'm a longer term customer?


edit - also I'm getting told having a credit card can help raise my credit score. I'm assuming that is over time should I have it for a long time? Also would I then be right to say that it could damage my score in the short if I had that plus say a utility/mobile phone opened within the same 6 months?

ooh and another I guess - I've been with the same mobile provider for about 6-7 years but they show up on my report as 21 months. So similar question as regards the utilities above?

I have a perfect credit history, and Noddle gave me 5/5 every month I checked for the few months between my financial adviser telling me about the service and moving house.

Then I moved house and it went down, 4/5, 3/5 and stayed there.

It seemed that it hadn't picked up my link to the new address. The old mortgage was gone, so very little current credit and a change of address.

This happened without me knowing (it's 30 days between updates) and my bank lent me £25k unsecured during that time without any quibble.

Once the correct new address kicked in back to 5/5 every month. I only have 3 credit products, a loan a card and a mortgage.

Anyway, that "score" is only a guide. The banks score on the data suing their own system.

In reply to Scarab9:

Don't know about the rest of it but id agree about the co op bank, they are a bunch of tossers,
I had a credit card with them and without asking they hiked my credit limit up and up again and again till it was about £8000 even though I didn't use the card that often.
then without warning they wouldn't renew the card even though I had never been late with a payment or anywhere near the credit lmit.
when I queried it they said it was policy not to say why even though ive never had an issue anywhere else and my credit history is excellent.
anyway I paid it off and binned the account and they had the cheek to ask why I wanted to leave.
feking morons.

In reply to Philip:

thanks. How long ish did it take to jump up?

I know the banks etc use their own system but I'm trying to rule things out. I also believe there's an issue with automated checkers due to some of my stuff being under Nick and some under Nicholas which I'll address after.

In reply to buzby:

yeah I managed to get told eventually that it was nothing to do with the handling of my account, it was while my credit was ok, I'm fully employed on a reasonably good wage, no black marks, no debt (had finance which was down to about £360 from originally £1000 at the time, that's gone now), basically other than not a homeowner I looked great......but they closed my account without warning and won't tell me why other than they changed some conditions so binned a load of people.

bastards. ethical my arse.

In reply to Scarab9:

I didn't notice for a couple of months, but I had assumed Noddle would pull the address update from the financial links - it did with my wife. I manually changed it and was back to 5/5 the next month.

In reply to Scarab9:

Sorry that I cannot go into detail at this time but after my experiences of the last decade I am pretty confident that the credit rating system is broken and worthless.

I have had a good rating and been offered facilities when I really shouldn't have been. I have had a bad rating when there was nothing wrong. These people are idiots.

Neighbourhoods matter but not in the way you might think. You might want to take great care to promote your rating if you move into a posh patch!