Bills with the man's name first.

[Magenta82]

Just got our new council tax bill, besides the fact that everything has gone up I'm annoyed at the way it's addressed.

I registered us, my name was first.
I own the house.
The money comes out of my sole account.
Both my first and last names are first alphabetically.

Yet somehow magically the council have his name first.

AIBU to be annoyed?

I can't get excited about it.
Just phone them and ask them to send you the bill in your name.

If the account is in joint names, why does it matter whose name is first? I really don't understand why it's a problem.

I've told this one on here before when this topic comes up. To those dismissing it as unimportant, do you think this is fair??

I had two current accounts with different banks, when me and my then fiance bought a house I added him to one of them and it became our main joint account for house related stuff. I didn't really notice at that time that his name appeared first. We then married, I changed my name etc etc. so as is the default naming convention the account name was Mr & Mrs Gotobed. A few years later the bank decided to go public and issue shares to all account holders.

EXCEPT as it was deemed too complicated to allocate shares to all the actual people named on accounts they issued the shares to the LEAD NAME ONLY!

Therefore by default (and systematic sexism) any women who held accounts jointly with a man didn't get any shares at all! So how is that fair? I was the original account holder but because I decided to allow my then H access to the account he benefitted and I was left out.

And to top it all off my (now ex) H decided that he would cash the share dividend cheques to his account (yes he was financially abusive which is why we're divorced and somehow he still managed to keep the shares).

YANBU - it would piss me off....then I'd be doubly pissed off by all the people who said "Who gives a damn. I couldn't get worked up about something so trivial"....but its not trivial. To me its blatant sexism. To others it's covert and they don't see it. That concerns me just as much. My mum says this everytime I get a letter address to Miss or Mrs. Neither of these are my title.
I'd make a fuss and ask for a new bill.

Agree OP. I do ALL the paperwork in our house. DH is dyslexic and that kind of thing is anathema to him. When we got together he'd not changed his car / bike / house insurance in a decade and was paying through the nose rather than renegotiate or review his outgoings.....

Not one thing arrives in my name. Council tax, joint bank account, water bill etc. I set up all our accounts in this house, yet not a single company or entity has bothered to consider that.

I get the absolute rage when things like holiday bookings revert to his name as lead passenger even though I booked the damn thing with me as the lead.

You’ve posted before I’m sure of it!
Why assume it’s sexist as his name is first? If it was the other way around I’m sure someone would moan about it. Not really an issue I could get bothered about! It’s wording on a letter.. get a grip!

I think this is a bigger problem than people realise. I can think of no other reason that the letter would be addressed that way other than someone decided to change it. It isn't chance. This could be the Councils policy, it could be the individuals ideology. It affects everyone.....its indicative of how far woman still have to go for equality.
Stop minimising. It's one example of a much wider issue many people find unacceptable.

That is fucking ridiculous!

@GrumpyPanda wow if you take that I'm 'provoked' by my comment then god help you in a real 'provoking' situation.

It’s better than being a single adult household and yet having to pay 75% of the council tax that two - or more - cohabiting adults pay though.

Otherwise YANBU

@Itsmyturnnow1 I can't think of any other reason why someone would deliberately chose to input the names into their 'system' in different way to the way it was submitted. There might be one though. Why do you think they swapped things around?

My DH automatically being named first didn’t bother me until I had a 4month old baby in winter and the heating packed in. DH was at work and a jobsworth refused to let me book an engineer as I wasn’t the named account holder. Even after I pointed out that I had registered the account and the bills were paid from my personal account, I still had to get the man to ring. Swapped providers and I am now named first.

I had an account with British Gas about 15 years ago with the DP when we first moved in to our flat. About 14 years later we moved in to our house and went to British Gas, I sorted British Gas entirely in my name, Ms Penny. They had no reason to believe that DP was living with me. Then I started getting bills through addressed to Mr DP and Miss Penny. I put in multiple formal complaints as for all they knew we could have split up, he could be dead etc. Yet they just decided that some random man I had lived with years before was suddenly the primary account holder.

I work for a bank and whenever I'm making account changes I'm meticulous about making sure the account holders stay the correct way around and that letters are addressed correctly. I raise it with colleagues when they don't as I agree it is a micro aggression and sexist.

Barclays are the main offender I see for sending bank statements out to Mr & Mrs Joe Bloggs. It causes a lot of issues as we can't then use that as proof of ownership for that account for Mrs Jane Bloggs as there is nothing there to say she is an account holder. So more time taken for Mrs Bloggs to sort out something which shouldn't be an issue to start with.

I think it must be random - I did all the paperwork etc and my name is first, my (male) partner's second.

I really couldn't get worked up about that.

Did you read @FannyGotobed post? Can you explain why that sort of shit is nothing to get worked up about?

I can confirm that they seemed to mix it up on this point; the flight was later cancelled and the email trail got complex, resulting in a panicked search for an expensive missing e voucher. This turned up in DHs email account. I was emphatically not cc'd!

I had never thought of it from a GDPR perspective, but you're right. It was directly via the airline, whose name rhymes with Grittish Lairways.

It's easier in the case if death when things are in both names. That's why we have both names in everything we are able to. Somethings can't be annoyingly.

The V5 only shows the registered keeper, it is not proof of ownership.

Is the invoice in your name?

It would never occur to me to give a shit about the order of names on a bill. I'm actually incredulous that anyone would notice, never mind care.

Reading whole thread can kind of shine a light on why it can be a problem

It wouldn’t bother me.

OP becoming magically unannoyed by yet another indicator of patriarchal bias won't diminish my actual problems one jot. I'm annoyed by it too, & I have huge actual problems to worry about at the moment.

This issue can also be down to data migration if councils move systems from one supplier to another (happens more regularly than you'd maybe think).

Ordering of household members can be changed between systems, depending on any sorting that was applied to data on extraction and subsequent load.

I could bore you shitless with how it could cause issues such as this, but it really is boring.

I had this when we moved house and all the postal correspondence (estate agents, solicitors and mortgage company) put my DH's name first despite me putting my name first on forms and being the one dealing with all of it.

Really p*ssed me off as it is the misogynistic, patriarchal society we live in and yes I had other actual problems to worry about