Hello friends,
My husband and I moved to London in October, and I want to post about my experience of "getting started" in the UK, in case this will be encouraging or helpful to anyone else preparing for relocation. We are not UK citizens, we are here on Tier 1 visas. We have excellent credit in the US, but that counts for nothing in the UK, so we were starting from zero.
My husband had a job already arranged, but the company was not going to be helping with relocation, so no housing allowance or assistance. However, having a job lined up was no doubt very helpful when we were home-hunting. Your experience may be somewhat different from ours if you are showing up with a visa but no job.
To start, we booked a hotel room with a kitchenette for ten days. We got a terrific rate online, so that was good. I tried to contact estate agents in advance of our arrival (with limited success) to set up appointments to see rental apartments. Based on what I had read on this forum, I also brought various original recent documents such as bank statements, utility bills, etc, from our life in the US, for the purpose of proving identity. As has been stated elsewhere on this forum, we did not need to have a permanent address in the UK to open a bank account. Since we were newly arrived (I think within 3 months is the guideline), Barclays just used our former US address when doing all the paperwork. Please note that we had to make an appointment with a "customer relationship manager" at Barclays. If your local branch is very busy, your appointment may have to be made two or three days in advance, so get on that right away. The actual process of applying for the account was easy. We presented our passports (for identity) and he looked at a couple of our US documents (to prove address), and then he set us up with a joint current account for paying our household bills, a joint savings account (better interest rate than the current account), and individual current accounts for the funds that we don't want to mingle. Because he also wanted to talk about insurance and other Barclays products, this meeting took a really long time. (Don't expect to get out of there quickly.) We did not want our ATM (Connect) cards sent to the hotel, so he arranged to have them sent to the Barclays branch, where we could collect them in ten days or so. Same with the PIN letters. Waiting for these to arrive was rather frustrating, and further complicated by the Royal Mail strikes.
Having our Barclays sort code and account number at hand was handy for setting up gas, electric, water and broadband once we found an apartment a few days later. We did not need the cards and PINs for these tasks.
By the way, getting the apartment was straightforward. The agent did ask us to fill out a credit check form online (I don't remember what company it was). The questions, and our answers, were ridiculously pointless, but to humor her we of course did it. Basically, we answered zero and no to nearly everything, and we did have a chance to give one phone number of a former landlord in the US, but I doubt the credit check company called the number. I wasn't too worried, because while we were in the estate agent's office the landlord himself stopped by and met us, and he seemed to be satisfied with us on a personal level. Ultimately, I think that was all that mattered, and even if the credit check had come back as "terrible risk, stay away from these losers" the deal still would have gone through. For extra measure I gave the agent photocopies of letters we had from our previous five landlords saying how much they enjoyed having us as tenants, but she seemed not to know what to do with them and actually tried to hand them back to me. So, don't know if it helped, but I figured it wouldn't hurt. (And since we have a dog, I wanted to make the extra effort.) I don't know the result of the "credit check" but she said from the outset that it would take five days and therefore we could not move into our new apartment right away. Fortunately the timing was fine because we could have one day overlap with our hotel booking. I'm glad that we booked the hotel for ten days instead of a week (as we had initially planned).
So as I said earlier, setting up the utilities was easy, just called and gave them our address (no proof required) and our bank details. I made sure to put my name on one, my husband's name on another, and both our names on one. Thus we each have some proof of address and/or credit history. (Same as with the bank accounts.)
We haven't paid council tax yet. I was told by the landlord that he already contacted them and they would mail us a bill, but if it doesn't come soon I will contact them myself.
Getting a mobile phone was surprisingly difficult. I thought that would be my first task in London, so that I could use the phone to call estate agents while we were home-hunting. Instead, I was stuck using my US phone (at 99 cents per minute) and payphones. I knew that I wanted a new iPhone 3GS (which is free on a two year contract), so I tried at O2, Carphone Warehouse, the Apple store itself and Orange (which recently started offering the iPhone). I was told lots of different things! You have to have a local bank account (not a credit card). Then when I had it...you have to have the bank card, so we can swipe it. So I finally got it...but you need the PIN too. Wait another week for that. OK, now I need a printed bank statement which I have received in the mail (not printed myself) and which shows at least five transactions on it. What?? This was getting ridiculous. Enough already.
Finally I went back to the Apple store, determined not to leave without a phone. I chose to deal with Apple because I like their staff the best, but the outcome may have been the same anywhere. They were satisfied with my documents proving my identity and address...I brought several but the ones she used were the bank card with my signature (no photo ID required, apparently) and a letter from EDF (gas/electric) with my name and UK address, stating that they were setting up a direct debit. This was not a formal bill (won't have that until December), but good enough. The sticking point was that I had been at this address for only two weeks, and her manager insisted that O2 would deny my application, and my UK credit history would be permanently damaged by having this denial on my record. He said that they would want to see that I had been resident in this country for three years with no credit blemishes. He really did say three years, although I wondered at time whether he meant to say three months, because three years sounds excessive. Either way, three years or three months, I simply wasn't going to wait any longer. I said I understood the risk, but I wanted to go ahead. He kept saying he was absolutely sure it would be denied and he had never seen one like this approved, and he really didn't want to put it through, and I kept saying I just want to try, please let's do it. At last he gave up attempting to talk me out of it, and he let the staff person finish typing my details and click the continue button.
Well, lucky me, on the next screen it came through as a "conditional approval"! All O2 wanted from me was a 100 pound refundable deposit, and they were happy to give me a free iPhone. No problem with that! I handed over the money, did a little happy dance (not really) and walked out of there with my lovely new iPhone. Smiles all round.
