Building society fails to deliver

Thousands of workers had their New Year plans disrupted after the UK's biggest building society, Swindon-based Nationwide, failed to deliver wages on time.

Nationwide apologised after admitting a glitch meant salary payments were missing from several thousand accounts on Wednesday morning.

It blamed an overnight processing problem after account-holders complained they had not received their pay packets on time.

A spokeswoman for the building society said she hoped to fix the problem by the end of the day.

"We would like to apologise," she added.

Nationwide said that a "small minority" of its Flex current account customers were affected by the problem.

Civil servant Iain Wicks, 41, said his local branch in Surrey had wrongly informed him that blame lied with the Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (Bacs).

He added: "I'd like them to explain what's going on. This has totally disrupted my New Year plans and I'm very annoyed that I have been wrongly told that this was not Nationwide's fault."

Nationwide said that no customers would lose out from payments failing to be processed.

Withdrawals of £500 were being accepted with proof of payment or a payslip.

Apacs, the UK payment association, confirmed the problem was with Nationwide, rather than the Bacs system, which is used to pay millions of salaries each month.