Nationwide payment outage left me with no money to pay for food shopping for my two severely disabled sons

MUM-OF-TWO Kathleen Reid was left with no money to pay for food shopping for her family, including her two severely disabled sons, due to a Nationwide payment outage.

Her finances were tipped over the edge when the building society's payment system went down again yesterday, the third time since Christmas Eve.

Kathleen, who lives in Dundee with sons Jamie, 7, and Paul, 17, sent £250 in two instalments from a Santander bank account to her Nationwide account on Monday night.

But the cash, which usually goes through straight away, did not appear on her Nationwide balance.

She told The Sun: "There are folk, including myself, who are going without food and power.

"My two severely disabled boys need money for respite activities and food."

Kathleen then tried to call Nationwide to find out if she could access some short-term support, but felt she was "palmed off".

Tweeting Nationwide didn't do the trick, either.

Kathleen, 47, was left with just £50 in her Santander account and nothing more to last her till the money came through.

The £50 she had left didn't cover the essential payments due out of her account or the supermarket shopping her family needed.

When the money failed to clear, Morrisons cancelled a food delivery the family were expecting on Tuesday morning.

Kathleen said: "We were left with nothing.

"Nationwide knows this is happening regularly now and had plenty of time to sort out contingency plans."

She was left "praying" the cash appeared in her account by 10pm yesterday - otherwise the Asda delivery she scheduled to replace the Morrisons order would get cancelled too and the family would have no food for the week.

Luckily, on Tuesday evening her first transaction of £150 arrived - but she still needed the second transfer of £100 to pay her bills.

Kathleen is now planning to move to a different bank as a result of the failure.

It is the building society's third batch of issues in recent weeks.

Thousands of customers were unable to receive their wages or pay their bills due to problems on Christmas Eve and again on New Years Eve.