Bank of England payment issue delays house purchases

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Technical issues affecting a vital payment system have led to some house purchases being delayed, the Bank of England said.

Glitches impacted the central bank’s Clearing House Automated Payment System (Chaps) which processes about £360 billion worth of transactions a day.

It confirmed later on Tuesday afternoon that the outage has been resolved.

Chaps is used by high street banks, businesses, and individuals buying expensive items like a car or to pay a deposit on a house.

It is also commonly used by solicitors to complete house sales.

The Bank had said a “global payments issue” was affecting the service and delaying some high value and time-sensitive payments, including some house purchases.

People and businesses were still able to use cash points, card payments and bank transfers as normal as retail payments were unaffected.

After resolving the issue, the Bank said: “We are pleased to confirm that the third party supplier has restored service following their earlier issues, and Chaps payments are settling as normal.

“We expect that all payments received by the Bank today will be settled by the end of the day.

“If you are concerned about a Chaps payment you plan to make or receive today, please contact your bank, or other payment service provider.”

Toby Leek, the president of Propertymark, said: “Completing on a property can be extremely stressful even without technical issues, however, it is important to remember that should systems ever cause unexpected problems at a vital moment within the transactional process these issues do tend to be fixed quickly.

“The flipside is in the short term, this can have the potential to leave people waiting outside their new property with a removal van full of their belongings in very extreme cases.”

The Bank experienced similar outages in August 2023, which stopped the system for about six hours.

Meanwhile, major high street banks were impacted by glitches affecting digital banking last month, leaving some customers temporarily unable to send and receive money.