Have you recently moved to the UK from Poland, South Africa, Latvia or  Lithuania? If you have you won’t have a credit history here in the UK. Most UK banks are looking for people with a good income and a good credit score who they can sell additional products and services to, including mortgages, pensions, insurance and credit cards, so what do other people do who can’t do a credit check? Well, the reality is the most of the UK high street banks offer a basic bank account.

Most of them offer some sort of cash card or debit card, and only rely on you not being bankrupt or having some sort of record of fraud. It’s guaranteed that there will be no credit check and your bad credit history if you have any will not be taken into consideration.
Most of these bank accounts allow standing orders and direct debits, but they have high fees if you were to go into a un authorised overdraft. Abbey, Natwest, Co-operative bank and Barclays all do some sort of non status bank accounts where you only need government issued proof of ID to get the account.