Over £40m Premium Bond prizes unclaimed

by John Fitzsimons on 24 November 2011  |  6 comments
Tweet

Guest blogger Jill Waters, Head of Customer Contact Centres at NS&I, explains how to check whether any of the £40 million worth of unclaimed Premium Bond prizes belong to you.

Reading this blog’s title may mean you are sitting at your computer right now thinking: “My Premium Bonds haven’t won any prizes for a while”, or “I had Premium Bonds once, but I can’t remember what happened to them”. The fact is you may have Premium Bonds and you may well have won a prize, but sometimes they can be forgotten, with the prizes going unclaimed.

It could have been you

Last week, National Savings & Investments launched a nationwide campaign to reunite people with their Premium Bond winnings. Over 740,000 Premium Bond prizes, worth over £40 million remain unclaimed. The biggest prize outstanding is £100,000 and belongs to a woman who at the time of winning lived in London.

Every one of the 1.7 million prizes generated each month is sent out to the lucky winner or paid directly into their bank account. However prizes often go unclaimed as a result of our increasingly mobile population: people may have moved house and not informed us of their change of address.

Or, Bonds may have been bought as a present for a birthday or christening and the winner has long since changed address, and so is unaware that they have won and sometimes are in line for a rather nice windfall.

There is no time limit for claiming prizes and each unclaimed prize is held until the winner has come forward. The oldest unclaimed prize is for £25 and owed to a man in South Yorkshire, who has £100 in Premium Bonds and was drawn as a lucky winner in November 1957.

A third of the nation have Premium Bonds!

Premium Bonds have been our most popular savings product since their introduction in 1956 and have remained on sale ever since. Over a third of the UK population have invested more than £42 billion, and every Bond that has been held for a full calendar month is eligible to win a prize in the monthly draw.

It is not just customers investing large sums who are owed large prizes. A woman in Derbyshire has just one Premium Bond but is the owner of a healthy prize of £10,000, drawn in April 2000.

So how can you go about checking if you have won, or even if you have Bonds in the first place? There are a couple of ways you can check (for free) to see if you have a prize owing to you:

Over one million people a month use our Premium Bonds prize checker to find out if they have won. Simply enter your Premium Bond holder’s number into the search facility.

Or if you don’t know your holder’s number you can write to us detailing as much information as possible to help us successfully trace any unclaimed prizes. This should include your name and address, any former names and addresses, date of birth.  Our address is:

Premium Bonds

National Savings and Investments

Blackpool

FY3 9YP

If you want to prevent any future prizes being forgotten, you can now opt to manage your Bonds online. This allows you to have any Premium Bond prizes paid straight into your bank account and to be notified of your prize wins by email rather than by post. By doing this hopefully you can reduce the risk of missing out on prizes, and of course you can get them much quicker!

Some of the top unclaimed prizes, ranging from £10,000 to £100,000, are listed in the table below.

Jill Waters is Head of Customer Contact Centres at National Savings & Investments