well our ISA's finally arrived yesterday, I'm still not happy at how long the process took and the lack of information you get during the transfer. I could be wrong but I'm convinced that there was a backlog at barclays, if that was the case then I would have been much happier if when I had called, rather than just saying we haven't received the cheques they said sorry sir but we are working through a backlog please bear with us.

Thanks for those who came back with comments, and to answer access's question, we were transferring into the 0.1% interest cash isa, but then offsetting this against our woolwich mortgage so effectively getting 3.75% which will obviously increase when interest rates increase.
regards
Paul

I endorse all that Paul JS says. My wife and I transferred our old Tessa ISAs from Barclays to Abbey this year. Abbey said they hadn't received the cheque after Barclays closed our accounts. The money seemed to disappear into a black hole for about 4 weeks. After spending what seemed like an eternity going through Abbey's call centre maze without any satisfaction I raised a complaint with both Barclays and Abbey and said I would go to the Financial Ombudsman if it wasn't sorted out in seven days.. As explained above all ISA transfers have to be made by cheque apparently so HMRC can keep track of them more easily according to both banks (sounds unlikely to me). It seems that banks aren't set up to deal with non electronic transactions these days.

Anyway to be fair to Abbey they responded quickly to the complaint,"found" the duplicate cheque that Barclays had sent and backdated the interest to the date the money left the Barclays account. They also made a small compensation payment to cover our costs and in acknowledegement of the hassle caused to us. Good on them.

I can only find two cash ISAs on Barclays website. One yields only 0.1% so I imagine you're not transferring to that one. The other is the Golden ISA 2.58% but that one doesn't allow transfers in. i appreciate you may be talking about the investment ISA.

Paul JS:

Unfortunately if you search consumer forums you will find many occurences of this.

The basic "rule" is that the process should not take more than 30 days starting from when the manager holding your original account receives the paperwork from the new provider.

What you should have done after 30 days had elapsed, and should now do as soon as possible, is to raise a formal complaint with Barclays strictly in accordance with the Barclay's complaints procedure. If you remain disatisfied after deadlock or after 8 weeks, whichever occurs first, refer the issue to the Financial Ombudsman Service. This is a ideal type of issue to be adjudicated becasue there is such a clear "balance of probability" that a cheque sent twice by courier is unlikely to have got lost twice except at Barclays. While the FOS process unfortunately may make up to year, if deserved a compensation award will be made. The process costs you nothing but Barclays have to pay a hefty case fee regardless of the outcome.

Hi All
We have recently attempted to transfer two Cash ISA's from Lloyds to Barclays. So far the process has taken about 8 weeks and the money is still not showing in our account.

We are stuck in the middle at the moment, where by Lloyds have confirmed to us that a cheque was sent (about three weeks ago) but Barclays are saying they have not received the cheque, Lloyds have now re-issued the cheque but barclays are still not receiving them. Lloyds Told us that they use a courier for this not Royal mail, so this should not be impacted by the postal strike.

What makes the situation the most frustrating is that the banks are reluctant to contact each other by anything other than letter (not the fastest medium of communication in this day and age) and I would say that Barclays have been particularly unhelpful when we have called.

Lloyds informed us that Barclays do not support wire transfers for ISA's which is why this must go via a cheque.

Has anyone else suffered a similar situation, is there anything else we can do?

At this point I would not recommend anyone to try and transfer an ISA to barclays as its a most unpleasant and frustrating experience

Regards
Paul