No replacement John Lewis credit card if you don’t have a UK address

John Lewis, which owns Waitrose, is moving the credit card issuer to a new company and invited existing cardholders to apply for a new card. However, after entering personal details I found I was rejected because I live in Guernsey (UK addresses only accepted, it seems).

This fact was known to them before the reapplication procedure, but still I was made to jump through all the hoops before they came up with ‘Computer says no’.

I gave John Lewis the chance to answer but all they did was refer me to the new card issuer.

So it seems to me that we are good enough to spend our hard-earned money in the two Waitrose stores in Guernsey, but we are not good enough now to continue having credit cards with them. I have held their store credit card for many, many years without a problem.

Now, in the grand scheme of things losing a store credit card (with important problems like rampant inflation and sky high energy bills to the fore) is not a big deal. But it is another example of goods/services not being available in Guernsey as they once were.

In this case, however, I can direct my spending to other food retailers who seem to appreciate having Guernsey customers.

NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED

Editor’s note: John Lewis Partnership responded:

We really value all of our customers in Guernsey and deeply regret that any of them cannot apply for our new Partnership Credit Card with our new credit provider, NewDay.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to simply transfer customers from our old credit provider to our new one. NewDay has a regulatory obligation to assess each customer on their creditworthiness and affordability before offering them our new Partnership Credit Card.

They are regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority to offer credit in the UK only, and therefore require customers to have a UK postcode, a point which we highlighted in our letter inviting customers to apply.

Customers in Guernsey were invited to apply because some may have UK addresses that we are not aware of. So, we felt this was the right thing to do rather than automatically closing their account.