Forget Nigel Farage and Coutts – banks have been locking ordinary people out of accounts for years

‘Account closures happen all too often, and the knock-on effects are even more troublesome for non-millionaires.’ Photograph: Umkehrer/Getty/iStockphoto

Despite all the recent front-page attention given to Nigel Farage and today’s development – the resignation of NatWest chief executive Alison Rose – there is something else you should know: banks have been quietly closing accounts without giving their customers any reasonable explanation for decades. Setting aside Farage’s politics and personality, and Coutts’s fragile disposition when it comes to people rich enough but arguably not wholesome enough to utilise their elite banking facilities, it should concern us when banks close our accounts with little or no warning. Ordinary people don’t get the prime minister hollering for justice, and we certainly don’t get apologies from CEOs.

My own experience from some 15 years ago began with the receipt of a polite letter from Royal Bank of Scotland informing me that it no longer wished to offer me banking facilities, and giving me 30 days to take my business elsewhere.