I've owned my Baronial Pile outright - no Mort-gage - since 1999 - other than a rather bizarre £5.84 that Alliance and Leicester (a.k.a Santander) could neither explain nor decide if they owed it to me or I owed it to them and which was only discovered by the Land Registry during us putting the place in joint names. (NOTE The Mort-gage word is spelled like that to stop this blasted system sticking unwanted hyperlinks into my blog. News Shopper People PLEASE STOP this - thanks)

Anyway that was all sorted (the spurious sum was quietly forgotten about!) and peace reigned.

However due to the costs of the building work we were having done we decided to take out another mort-gage (hyper link removed by me AGAIN!) to pay for it.

So off we went - cap in hand to my financial advisor who got us a good deal with - wait for it - Santander.

We filled in a myriad forms and off they all went and we waited for the outcome.

Good news - the man from Santander he say YES.

So we have yet more forms to fill in and then to be sent off to their solicitors along with the deeds to the place to prove it's in our name.

Then..... nothing.

So today my wife gave their solicitors a call to ask what was happening. "Oh" says telephone person "We've just written to you to tell you that we can find no reference of either you or your husband ever living at or owning that address " ! ! ! ! ! !

Sharp intakes of breath in the Naq & Wife's office.

The woman continued to explain that we'd need to fill in an ID1 form (Which we did a few weeks back for the Land registry.) and then engage a solicitor at £1,000,000 an hour to sign that we swear we're who we say we are.

"Hold up" says I, not one to be best impressed by ever giving sharks-in-sheep's-clothing unnecessary money, "I've lived here since 1995 and my bl**dy name's on the bl**dy deeds that we've already sent them."

My wife at the same time was pointing this fact out to the woman on the phones albeit in a more tactful manner than I would have done.

The woman then explains to my wife that they use an external company for something called an ID search. This would appear to be remarkably similar to a credit search as one of the companies they claim to use is Experion.

While my wife's carrying on a conversation trying to elicit more info from little Miss-not-too-forthcoming, I'd been on line to the Land Registry and found my deeds (at my expense) which plainly say myself and my wife are on the deeds and that - wait for it - Santander are the Lo-an makers on the property. (NOTE yet another unwanted hyper link because of lo-an)

The woman on the phone then informs my wife that there's nothing she can do but we'll have to wait for the letter they're sending us. "It could just be something like a spelling mistake of course but you'll still need to see a solicitor to sort it out."

She was then asked why, if it is a spelling mistake and that it would have to be on their part, we should be held responsible and have to pay?

The equivalent of a telephonic shrug was the reply.

At this point the phone call finished - if only for a while because a terrier with a bone can hold nothing to my Missus with her dander up.

So she phoned Santander's solicitors again and explained how very dischuffed she was that we'd sent all this info as they requested; all of which proves who we are and that we are the legal owners and now we're being told that we don't even exist.

This time she spoke to someone with a reasonable number of working brain cells. She said she'd go away and try something and phone us back as soon as she had an answer. My cynicism expected that to be never but it was in fact within about 30 minutes.

This time both my wife and I suddenly exist again.

And the reason for a earlier vanishing trick?

The ID search company only use data which has the first and last names of people stored on record.

Consequently when the search was done using my first, second and last name, and similar for my wife, neither of us appeared to exist.

When they dropped our middle names suddenly there we were!

Now what the blood-and-stomach-pills is the point of credit/ID search companies only having data, which is basically incomplete?

The basis of our mort-gage offer depended on this and, if not for one woman having a damn sight more savvy than another, we'd have had to go and shell out large sums of money for a solicitor to provide yet more paperwork, none of which would have been needed if the job was done correctly in the first place.

So we have all these problems with identity theft but when the real data is available they can still screw it up good and proper.

I have to ask what use is utilising an identity check record system which doesn't even hold the full names of the people they want to search for?

Is this just yet another case of " Yeah, yeah, whatever, yadda yadda yadda - give us your money" prevailing over any form of actual customer care?

And we all know the answer to that one don't we?

PS: PLEASE can you dear Newsshopper webmasters stop this auto hyperlinking in blogs. It's not big and it's not clever!