Tolls that have to be paid online

[Fianceechickie]

We live nearish the new Mersey bridge in Runcorn. You can't pay there and then, there are no booths and you have to remember to go online and pay when to get home. Is it me, or is that a neat way of money grabbing? Cheap for the operator who doesn't have to put in toll booths and people are bound to forget, being tired, busy, other things to do and they can just fine you then. DH been fined twice in the last few months having forgotten to pay the £2 when he gets home on evenings he's used it. On one occasion he paid for one trip that same day but forgot he'd driven across it again. You can set up an account but there's a £10 fee and £20 minimum top up. I've seen this on roads in Ireland too. I've not used it because I just know i would forget to pay!

Really interesting thread. Thanks for starting it OP.

I agree pretty much with Cuboidal. Especially the bit about assisted tech for disabled people - companies and government need to invest in this.

companies and government need to invest in this.

But won't .

Chatting about that last night with DW, and in less than 5 minutes I came up with 5 possible ways to use the tax/rates systems to encourage business to make premises accessible. The reason it didn't take the 10 minutes it took originally (20 years ago) is because we both remembered them.

The reason they only took 10 minutes 20 years ago is I was a slower reader - they've been around since the 70s, apparently.

Plus ca change ....

I cannot put into words how much I despise cheques. Paying one in is a special journey, and thanks to the experience of the cash point being out of order 3 times in a row, requires an in-hours visit to our bank.

Even HMRC managed to refund some tax automatically to my bank account last year. Fair play ! (I find generally a lot of government stuff is quite available online. Which makes the bits which aren't all the more obvious ....)

Cheques are a massive pain in the arse. Whenever someone says 'I prefer cheques' I always hear 'however awkward and difficult that is for you' I.e. 'I'm an awkward person who puts my own convenience above creating extra work for you'.

I worked at a bank for a few years several years ago and they had to spend an entire day teaching us how to use cheques as one of us had ever seen one and therefore would have been very easily hoodwinked by people not filling them out right or signing them!

DWs stylist used to "insist" on cheques. Which isn't too bad (much easier to write a cheque than pay one in).

However, after explaining how bank transfers work, it's the preferred method ... the money is in the bank before she leaves. Apparently most of her older clients have no problem with it, and the others pay cash.

Paying one in is a special journey, and thanks to the experience of the cash point being out of order 3 times in a row, requires an in-hours visit to our bank.

Why not send it in the post?

I don’t use cheques myself, btw, if I can avoid it. Online all the way.

I worked at a bank for a few years several years ago and they had to spend an entire day teaching us how to use cheques as one of us had ever seen one and therefore would have been very easily hoodwinked by people not filling them out right or signing them!

My first week as a student at Sainsburys, the manager got all of us (students) in the canteen and held up a fistful of returned cheques ... no signature, amount in words missing, or amount in figures missing, or when they were both there they didn't match. Cheques with a 1/2p, cheques without a guarantee card (that had bounced), and the best was a handwritten cheque - literally. That was 1982.

That's before you start on the (then) £50 limit for a guarantee card. Imagine that now ? (No, you can't write cheques of £50 to pay a single bill - that's not covered).

That's before you realise banks can lose cheques after paying in, and refuse to credit an account (yes, has happened).

However, as a friend (who works for Lloyds ) pointed out, a cheque is the only way to transfer money to an anonymous bank account. Not anonymous by person. But by bank. And until we have a replacement (looks at blockchain) they are here to stay. Not because they are particularly liked or good. Just because they are the only way to deliver that feature. Which (for some reason) is a feature a lot of wealthy people seem to like . (As Deep Throat said ,,, follow the money).

Why not send it in the post?

because if it's lost, it's lost.

Nowadays there's the snap-a-cheque feature (do all banks have that ?) which would have been OK. I don't mind being able to do it from my desk. (I do mind the up to 10 working day delay).

Sending In the post is yet another hassle though surely? You have to purchase stamps and therefore spend your own money posting it. And things get lost in the mail, so no guarantee it'll reach them. Also find it odd how for those who feel cheques are more secure than online banking, they have zero problem posting a piece of paper with their account number sort code and signature on! Just because it's the way it's always been done doesn't make it the more convenient or secure way.

When I was 16 I worked in a music shop and someone paid for a £600 instrument with a cheque... I'd never seen one before so got my manager to look it over seeing as I hadn't a clue what I was looking for. He glanced and said it was fine. Let them walk out with it only to realise later they hadn't even signed it! Luckily my manager took the flak as I did get him to look at it thankfully.

Also to send in the post you need to include a paying in slip so they know which account to deposit it into. So you still have to go to the bank at some point to get one of those!

Sending In the post is yet another hassle though surely? You have to purchase stamps and therefore spend your own money posting it.

In the spirit of not being a complete arse, I would have been willing to overlook that for one cheque in 10 years. But ...

And things get lost in the mail, so no guarantee it'll reach them.

Unless you go signed for (which is another special trip out to a post office, plus cost)

When I enquired (to try not to be a complete arse) I was told that it had to be the original, and if it were to go astray, a scan of it (which is trivial) would not suffice.

I really can't imagine where a cheque these days might come from ? Everything from home is done via bank transfer or PayPal, and it's EFT when we're out. Even the "cashback" from our last mortgage switch was a transfer into our account.

Isn't the bigger point here, that as these things become more and more common and no one objects or the funding accumulated is not subject to scrutiny, we are paying a plethora of stealth taxes? The Dartford crossing must've been paid for many, many times over, yet it's still charged.

And if we pay road tax, it can be argued that these kinds of charges hit those on lower incomes disproportionately harder. But why should anyone pay, if we've all already been paying?!

See also: police and fire, and social care charges on your council tax bills coming soon. These should be coming from realistic central government funds but instead we will all be charged locally. When we've all already been paying tax all year.

The entire tax system is in need of overhaul, that's why you're seeing these kinds of charges creep in, unchallenged.

However, as a friend (who works for Lloyds smile) pointed out, a cheque is the only way to transfer money to an anonymous bank account.

That's simply not true. The paying bank knows who the collecting bank is, and will tell the authorities on request. How do you think cheques work? You write a cheque. The payee pays it into a bank. The collecting bank collects the money by referring the cheque back to the drawee bank, which transfers the money, knowing which bank it's going to. Some of this is elided by clearing houses, but the basic link is there: you write a cheque to a payee, the payee's bank collects the cheque by contacting your bank. They aren't bearer instruments, or anything like them.

I didnt know these sorts of tolls existed. If I were away from home it might be hard to pay it if I couldnt find free WiFi. My mum, at 77, drives but has never used the internet and would have no idea how to.

"I really can't imagine where a cheque these days might come from ?"

I think mostly older people who've chosen to stick with how they've always done things and keep giving cheques as gifts rather than cash or bank transfers.

Although bizarrely when I did work in the bank, some customers would write a cheque out to themselves to cash at the counter! They'd just use their chequebook to write themselves a cheque for £50 or whatever and hand that over and be given cash in return. It was so incredibly inefficient and although I wondered if part of the reason was maybe feeling unsafe standing at an ATM getting money out (in the bank they had the illusion of security being indoors and time to sort their purse out), they could have done that in the bank and use us as an ATM so no need for the cheque at all.

I think a lot of people probably just like the routine and like associating money with a 'paper trail' such as a physical chequebook or a passbook, which is silly when you can have your statements sent to your house monthly.

I've been reading this thread with an increasing sense of living in a different country! Round here, although large companies are doing bank transfers, particularly the older small traders are still cash or cheques.

63% of the UK use online banking regularly, so that means 1 in 3 people still don't - and I suspect they're not equally spread across the country.

On the other hand, even the oldest pensioners cope with contactless "payment" in the form of their bus pass.

There's a voluntary organisation locally I have some involvement in, ... all the minutes are handwritten and photocopied, Now there we are a bit ahead. I'm involved in 8 local community groups and clubs. All have electronic minutes, we communicate by email (although some have ways of communicating with those not on the internet), some have facebook pages, web-sites, two have got as far as twitter and instagram. I know email and facebook are now old people's media, but handwritten minutes and photocopying is a distant memory.

"Today 09:41 RaininSummer

I didnt know these sorts of tolls existed. If I were away from home it might be hard to pay it if I couldnt find free WiFi. My mum, at 77, drives but has never used the internet and would have no idea how to."

Nobody has any idea how to do something new until they try or are taught :)

I assume if she had to use the internet to sort something out she'd be able to ask you to teach her?

Although bizarrely when I did work in the bank, some customers would write a cheque out to themselves to cash at the counter! They'd just use their chequebook to write themselves a cheque for £50 or whatever and hand that over and be given cash in return. That was the only way you could get money out of your account in the 60s and early 70s. And from your own branch only. If you wanted to get money out of a different branch (eg you were on holiday) you had to set up an "arrangement" in advance to draw money from that branch.

This thread has reminded me to pay my Dartford Crossing charge from yesterday...Thanks!

I know meredintofpandiculation :) we had to sit through some interesting stuff during training about the evolution of personal banking!

Do you think it's as simple as somebody thinking 'well I always did it this way so I'm gonna carry on for as long as I can even if there are better ways to do it'?

This entire thread about people who refuse to use normal technology disenfranchising themselves is an issue that will have evaporated in a few decades I think as nobody from younger generations will have grown up unfamiliar with the internet or unwilling to do simple things like online banking. I'm not naive enough to think there won't always be new technologies to embrace though and probably always a faction of stick in the muds who resist change.

the older small traders are still cash or cheques.

Provided they have a pool of customers and suppliers willing to trade in whatever medium of exchange they mutually agree, that's their decision. They can trade in the sort of plastic tokens that baby sitting circles used to use for all the odds it makes, aside from when they start doing it to evade tax.

The problem comes when they run out of suppliers willing to be paid by cheque or customers will to jump through those hoops. I typed but deleted an account of the bankruptcy of a restaurant near here, as it's rather too identifying, but the tl;dr was "restaurant that didn't accept cards found that if your prospective customers are mostly students and twenty-somethings you go out of business".

My kids' piano teacher switched to online payment only, as did their driving instructor. Why? Because they had reached the point where customers who wanted to pay online but would have refused to pay by cheque were a large majority, and the customers who paid by cheque were a pain in the arse in other ways, that they could afford to lose. I haven't written a cheque in years, and I've paid plumbers, electricians, carpenters, the whole gamut of "ah, but what about...?" I guess they accept cheques, I don't know; I know that if they demanded a cheque from me, it would be the last piece of work they'd do for me.

nobody from younger generations will have grown up unfamiliar with the internet or unwilling to do simple things like online banking

More meta than that, they will have grown up familiar with the idea that things change, and that they need to revisit how they do things. People in their forties weren't "brought up" with a lot of the technology they used, but we don't see forty year olds posting about how they weren't taught to use an iPhone at school and therefore can't be doing with this new technology. The same goes for online banking, pretty much: it would have been in its very, very early days when a forty year old got their first bank account, and yet they appear to cope.

Lemon, you would think so but my Mum is one of those who refuses to use all this new fangled technology and in this case there would be a real rush to avoid the fine so all v stressful.

Lemon, you would think so but my Mum is one of those who refuses to use all this new fangled technology

Life's about choices. She chooses not to use technology that the vast majority of the population are fine with. She's had twenty-five years of the Internet in widespread civilian/commercial use to get used to it, a period that started when she was 52. The consequence of that 25 years of refusal is that some things are going to be harder for her than they might otherwise be. Her choice.

Do you think it's as simple as somebody thinking 'well I always did it this way so I'm gonna carry on for as long as I can even if there are better ways to do it'? No, LemonShark I think it's that once you've learned how to do do something, you carry on doing it that way without thinking until such time as it doesn't work for you. So if the "better ways" don't offer any real advantage to you in your situation, you don't move to them.

On-line banking, for example - an older person I help has declining cognitive faculties so learning new things is increasingly difficult, poor fine motor control so keyboard typing is slow, subject to errors and being timed out. For him in his particular circumstances it offers no advantage over a branch based account.