A HEROIN OVERDRAFT

NatWest had been told that Hannah Mayne was a drug addict on
benefits. So why did it give her UKP850, which she blew on drugs?

In October last year Hannah Mayne walked into the local branch of
NatWest Bank and asked for an overdraft of UKP50. Although she was an
unemployed teenager whose only income was from benefits, the man
behind the counter said that would be no problem. In fact, she could
have UKP1,200 if she wanted. Ten minutes later Hannah walked out with
UKP850 in cash in her pocket and the facility to access UKP350 more.
Three weeks after that she took a heroin overdose. She had spent
every penny of NatWest's money on drugs.

Taken on its own, the irresponsible way in which a bank will lend to
a young person with no discernible way of paying it back these days
is a worrying enough story. As the high street banks recently
announced record profits, the Office of Fair Trading is demanding new
rules to outlaw reckless lending. But what makes this case worse --
much worse -- is that the bank had been told by Hannah herself that
she was a drug addict. Hannah's mother, Kate, an interior designer
who specialises in historical buildings, had persuaded her to do the
responsible thing by cutting off her money supply for drugs. Together
she and Hannah, then 18, visited her local branch in Brighton and
asked it to stop giving her credit -- by credit card or overdraft --
because she was a drug abuser and would only rack up debts to feed
her habit. The member of staff there listened sympathetically and
wrote the details into her file. Kate and Hannah remember her turning
the computer screen around and showing them what she had written.

But several months later, frantically trying to placate a dealer to
whom she owed money, a dishevelled Hannah went to a NatWest branch
again to chance her arm in pleading for UKP50 to offer him as an
interim payment. She was, she says, amazed when the offer came back
to lend her 24 times that amount. "I didn't really understand when
they said 'You can have the money in your hand today'," she says. "I
was in there only five or ten minutes." Anxious to get out of
Brighton, she and a fellow addict disappeared to Birmingham together.
While she was away her mother opened her bank statement and saw to
her horror that Hannah was UKP1,199.97 overdrawn. Kate phoned the
branch and told it in tears that the agreement not to give Hannah any
more credit had been broken. "If she overdoses, I will hold NatWest
responsible," she said.

A few days later that is precisely what happened. The hospital in
Birmingham called Kate and said that Hannah was in intensive care. If
her friend hadn't found her in the hostel, she would have died. The
branch told Kate it could find no information about Hannah's
condition on her file because the computer would wipe off any notes
after a certain period of time.

Hannah recovered, but that was by no means the end of her problems.
It transpired that Natwest was charging Hannah UKP40 a month for the
overdraft. Her entire income comprises UKP70 a week income support
and UKP160 a month disability allowance. Kate urged her to apply for
a special loan to pay it back but, in one of the strange anomalies of
modern banking, she was told that she didn't qualify because "her
income is from benefits". So, asked her mother, she qualified for the
UKP1,200 overdraft while on benefits but not for a loan to pay that
debt back? Yes, said the bank. This baffling -- and, in Kate's view,
immoral -- contrariness is one of the main reasons that she has
decided to speak out about Hannah's problems and the way in which the
system generally, ranging from drugs support projects to the NHS,
thwarts families trying to cope with a child on drugs. NatWest in
effect, and irresponsibly, bankrolled her daughter's overdose, she
says. It offered a compromise deal in which it would waive the bank
charges and Hannah could pay it off at UKP30 a month. The Maynes
refused on principle since they maintained that it was the bank's
fault for having given out the money in the first place.

Their other motive in speaking out is to puncture the myth that it is
only kids on sink estates who get hooked on heroin. "Anyone who
thinks that this affects only poor people is kidding themselves," Kate says.

The first thing to be made clear is that NatWest is not to blame for
Hannah's heroin addiction, and the Mayne family knows that. Nor is a
deprived or broken background. Hannah, now 19, has enjoyed a more
privileged upbringing than most. She went to a beacon school in
Chichester, her mother has a successful and creative career in
London, while her father is the financial director of a major
company. The family home is a beautiful Georgian house on one of the
most exclusive streets in Brighton. The Maynes' younger daughter
suffers no such problems. Yet in the past year the couple have spent
more than UKP20,000 putting Hannah through the Priory and, in times
of desperation have given her hundreds more pounds for drugs, unable
to bear the sight of her body "rattling" for a fix.

They have, during her psychotic and violent episodes, begged in vain
for doctors to section her under the Mental Health Act. They have
watched helpless as she has stolen to fund her habit. Kate, who
spends her working days consulting with QCs, sometimes has to laugh
bleakly at the surreal duality of her existence: by day she can be
lunching with barristers at expensive restaurants, by night meeting
drug dealers in squalid back alleys to pay them off, in the hope that
they won't harm her daughter. "You end up doing things you never
dreamt in your worst nightmares you would do," says Kate. "But this
is the reality of having a child addicted to heroin, and it can
happen to anyone. There is not enough help out there, and I want
people to know just how hard, how utterly defeating, it is coming up
against the system." Hannah was always a vulnerable child, prone to
depression possibly because she suffered a partial disability,
Hirshsprung's disease, which left her incontinent until about the age
of 10. Although she was an A student, the condition made her
withdrawn, and she shrugged off affection. "I used to say that she
was the daughter with barbed wire around her," says Kate. Her descent
into addiction probably started when she was about 13 and began
binge-drinking and truanting from school. Kate recalls driving around
the streets looking for her when she failed to return home. At 16
Hannah dropped out of school and the family moved to Brighton. Her
distraught parents knew that she had experimented with cannabis but
were more concerned at that time about her alcohol intake. For a time
in 2004 they sent her to live with family in Wales to recuperate.
Ironically and unbeknown to them, it was there, in a rural town, that
she first tried heroin.

But it wasn't until October 2005 that Hannah confessed that she had
addiction problems. It was a Sunday morning and Kate and her husband
were at church when Hannah dramatically crashed through the door,
tears streaming down her face and, high on cocaine and alcohol, said
that she needed help. She had run up debts of almost UKP1,500 with
NatWest and couldn't control her alcohol and drug habit.

Her parents were appalled but took her home, put her to bed and set
about trying to sort out the problem. First they paid off her debts
and then, in December 2005, Kate and Hannah visited the branch to
tell it about her addiction and ask for credit to be stopped. Hannah
was then booked into the Priory for a month to be treated for
alcoholism and drug abuse. She came home looking healthy. The family
got her into a sheltered housing project for people dependent on
drugs. All seemed to be going well. In February on Kate's birthday
Hannah wrote her mother a card. "It was a beautiful card saying that
she wanted to get better and make me proud of her," says Kate. "Two
days later she relapsed." The reason was that Hannah's boyfriend Joe,
whom she had met at the project, had died from a heroin overdose. She
was due to meet him that day at a coffee shop but he never turned up.
"I'd never experienced death before," says Hannah, a beautiful but
frail girl in a stained red anorak that looks pathetically misplaced
in her parents' elegant home. "The day before, I had hugged him and
was due to meet him the next day. It totally freaked me out. I wanted
to forget about everything; I just didn't care at that time. So I
started taking heroin and crack."

Thus began Hannah's real dependence on heroin. Kate's face wearies as
she recounts the umpteen nightmarish incidents that have accompanied
it. There have been more expensive visits to the Priory; times when
she has tried to attack her younger sister; when she has broken into
the family home stealing cameras, jewellery and television digiboxes
to raise cash; the endless mopping up of the vomit and diarrhoea. For
a time Hannah lived on the streets with a boyfriend, who committed
petty crimes to get hold of enough money for them to score.

Once, in front of three policemen who had been called to the house,
she lunged at her mother with a glass. "She went completely berserk,
scratching, hitting and screaming 'I'm going to f*ing kill you',"
says Kate. "The police sprayed her with pepper spray. Even then the
doctors wouldn't section her. I asked the police, 'Does she actually
have to kill me firstUKP' and they said 'Probably'." With the benefit
of hindsight Kate and her husband know that they did things wrong.
They should have shown Hannah more "tough love", pressing charges
when she burgled their house (she had been denied access to the house
to protect her younger sister), and refusing to give her money. But,
as she says: "My learning curve with heroin was about to begin. I had
no idea what to expect or how bad it would be.

"My husband hated me giving her the money. But she would come round
screaming and begging, and very often I just did. I found it very
hard not to. It's painful to see your child like that. She would be
shaking and desperate for her next fix.

"She would say, 'If you don't give me something I'll steal, shoplift,
beg, pickpocket'. I didn't want her ill and vulnerable on the
streets, ripe for attack. You are caught every which way -- damned if
you do, damned if you don't." The absurdity of her double life --
straddling the rarified world of London's historic buildings and the
feculence of Brighton's smack-dealing community -- often feels
surreal. She remembers once staying with Hannah in a hostel while she
injected heroin into her arm (in case she overdosed by accident) --
"a horrible, pitiful, really degrading sight" -- then getting in a
car and driving to Chichester to watch a fashion show. "You find
yourself in a pub in Hove waiting for a dealer and thinking about
when your beautiful little girl used to be in a party dress."

But it is the lack of help that has floored them most. Housing
schemes and drug treatment programmes impose ludicrously inflexible
rules that are peevishly incompatible with the chaos of an addict's
life, she says. At A&E you are treated like "scum" if you are a drug
user. There are groups, and groups within groups, but no one is
taking an overview; it is a system of ever-decreasing circles in
which no one takes charge. "I am reasonably articulate, educated and
in good health, and it utterly defeats me," Kate says. "Imagine what
it must be like if you are not?" The attitude towards users like her
daughter, she says, is punitive and rigidly inflexible. A vast number
of heroin users take the drug to mask the pain of mental illness, yet
we choose to punish them for it, she says. And the system is
hopelessly bureaucratic -- a tangled web of key workers, support
services, hostels and benefits offices.

"In my experience none of the different agencies talks to each other.
Addicts fighting to get off the drug have to battle against so much
bureaucracy to get clean. It's almost impossible for them." Methadone
doesn't work for many addicts; it hasn't for Hannah. Some simply
develop a double habit. Kate believes that heroin being medicalised,
not criminalised, is the only way.

David Raynes, an executive counsellor on the National Drug Prevention
Alliance, agrees that there needs to be more coordination between
police, social services and local authorities, but doesn't think
offering heroin to addicts on the NHS would cut crime, or help
individual users. "One big criticism at the moment is that the best
treatment you get is in prison. This has to change. But just giving
people heroin to stop them committing crime will not work because you
are not stopping their behaviour, or dealing with their lifestyles
and mental issues," he says. Open-ended heroin programmes would be
incredibly expensive for the NHS. Health professionals also point out
that users would also still be injecting, up to three times a day,
increasing the risk of infections such as HIV and hepatitis. At least
methadone is taken orally, he says, and only once daily.

Meanwhile, Hannah, beautifully spoken but gaunt from months of
anorexia, is still utterly dependent on heroin, begging her parents
for money each day and coming to the conclusion that she no longer
wants to live. Heroin for her is not a high, merely a painkiller.
"Some people are born and just know how to live life, but I don't
know how to do a lot of things that other people just know," she
says. "Ever since I was young I've needed a drink to deal with social
situations with friends. I had low self-esteem, I hated myself;
getting wasted was a way of feeling free." She summarises heroin
addicts' catch22: always chasing the feeling that they had the first
time they used the drug but never ever finding it again. "Before I
became a heroin addict I thought it was just people you see on the
streets, but that is a small percentage. I've met people with
mortgages, jobs. On the outside they have a normal life, but on the
inside they are addicts.

"I hate my life and really do want to sort myself out. But I find
life really difficult." A few days after this interview Hannah
decided to attempt suicide. She first resolved to jump off a
multi-storey car park, then said that she would inject air into her
veins. Her mother stopped her and took her, weeping with desperation,
to A&E. She was admitted but, despite her threats to kill herself,
doctors again refused to section her. A few hours later she left
hospital and went in search of drugs. "What is the point, Mummy?" she
asked. "I may as well die." Kate and her husband are in utter despair
but refuse to be secretive about Hannah's condition. This, they say,
is the only way that things might change. "I was one of those people
who thought that people take drugs for enjoyment," Kate says. "Well,
everything I've witnessed in the past 18 months shows me there isn't
any enjoyment in it. Once, in the Priory, Hannah told me that she
doesn't understand this world and cannot stand the pain of it. I
think that's when I realised that she was ill, deeply troubled and
very damaged.

"We tried our best to prevent [the overdose] from happening, and the
last thing you expect is to have the bank working against you. I just
want to highlight how irresponsible, how potentially dangerous, it is
to give vulnerable people credit like this.

"I live in the now, I don't look forward. I just think that I have a
disabled daughter and she may get better, but she may not. If she
does, it will take years. Until then, my life is not mine, it is hers."

Banks Can't Discriminate

Eric Leenders, Executive Director Of The British Bankers' Association

Should an individual be censored to play a full part in society and
all that society offers? Only the individual can answer that. A
person can use a situation such as borrowing to their advantage and
there is little that bank staff can do. In terms of opportunism in
funding an addiction, through petty crime or whatever, it is the
same. The individual presents an external persona of someone who is a
responsible borrower.

Banks can't do anything in law to discriminate against individuals so
they must be careful what kind of information they commit to their
files and how this information is used. Twelve months on [from, for
example, NatWest being told Hannah was a heroin addict], that
individual could convince staff that they are in a different place
and can manage credit.

You can make this kind of decision only on a case-by-case basis. On
occasion the judgments made by bank staff might be inappropriate.
However, it can be incredibly difficult to decipher the evidence a
borrower can present to you.

Most banks are responsible lenders and most individuals are
responsible borrowers, in 95 per cent of cases. Credit is one of the
most heavily regulated products in the UK, and the UK has some of the
toughest regulations in Europe.

To tell someone that there are funds available for them if they need
it is different from someone deciding to take it. Just because
something is available doesn't mean that you should take advantage of
it. Individuals must ask themselves: am I borrowing this for
something I need, do I understand the product that I am using to buy
it, and will I be able to pay back the amount? Most people recognise
that if you don't need something, you shouldn't buy it.

Mistakes Will Always Be Made

Malcolm Hurlston, Chief Executive Of The Consumer Credit Counselling Service

We would argue that banks should keep information of this kind on
record for six years, after which time the customer should have the
chance to review it. Six years is the same period as county court
judgments, and roughly the length of time credit reference agencies
hold information about individuals.

We certainly aren't against people being offered credit. It is a good
thing for people to receive different offers. Some people get into
difficulties, usually because of the ending of a relationship or job,
or health problems. A small number shouldn't be offered credit at
all. The Government maintains a register, the registry of judgments,
orders and crimes, which goes back six years, for this purpose.

There is pressure on financial institutions to be increasingly
financially inclusive. We think there is actually less bad debt than
there was a year ago. We received 40 per cent more calls to our
helpline this year than last year, but we think this is because
people are calling it sooner. There is no reason why bad debt should
be increasing -- inflation is low, employment is high and the economy
is generally stable.

Banks will always make mistakes in lending. They have gone through a
bad phase recently. There is now a lot more automated information at
their disposal; they have relied too much on it and ignored the
personal touch. This was up to about 18 months ago, when they
realised that this approach needed to be supplemented. Also they are
making more money on interest payments and fees, which means that
they have an incentive to lend to people on the fringes of society.

A Statement From NatWest

Since Kate contacted The Times , NatWest bank has agreed to write off
Hannah's debt. The bank says:

NatWest would like to apologise to Miss Mayne and her family for the
confusion caused by their dealings with the bank in recent months,
and has every sympathy with their current situation. We are unable to
find any records on our systems that indicate Miss Mayne's personal
circumstances.

Miss Mayne requested an extension to her overdraft in October and
accepted the amount offered. All overdraft applications are subject
to strict criteria and checks, with an emphasis on ensuring that the
customer would not be entering into a commitment that they could not
meet. NatWest takes its responsibilities in this regard very
seriously as it is neither in our customers' nor our own interest to
encourage anyone into debt that they cannot afford to repay.

We have a clearly defined process to help customers experiencing
financial hardship; expert staff initiate contact and work with them
to resolve their problems. As an adult customer and a sole account
holder, Miss Mayne has autonomy over her account. On entering the
branch to request an extension to her overdraft in October, Miss
Mayne would have been in effect overriding any existing instruction
from herself.

With regard to Miss Mayne not qualifying for the loan she applied
for, we can advise that loan applications are subject to individual
circumstances and there had been a change to Miss Mayne's financial
circumstances relating to her income and expenditure. Based on the
information that Miss Mayne supplied at the time, NatWest was unable
to approve the application for lending. NatWest takes its
responsibilities in this regard very seriously.

Through further dialogue with Miss Mayne over the past week we have
reached an appropriate resolution with her and her mother.