Thanks to Vodafone, I now know what it’s like finding you have adverse data on your credit report and trying to fix it. All I wanted was a sensible Morgan Stanley Platinum Card so I could get cash back of 0.5% of everything I spend in a year. Mine was a problem specific to people with few credit relationships: a single error in the data provided by firms you have a relationship with, like a date of birth, can put a new lender off.

But it’s easier to fix wrong data than to put data there when there isn’t any. Reliance on credit records means everyone should have their own. So my wife now has her own credit card and can build her own credit record . I recommend paying the £2 to get a credit report from Experian and Equifax. If like mine, your service provider was bought by Vodafone, definitely check, because Vodafone have been making up birth dates all over the place. Are they repentant? Will they stop? What do you think: “On transferal from your previous service provider, no date of birth details were given, so in order to complete the transaction and to keep your number on the network, a default date of birth was temporarily placed on your account.” ‘Temporary’, by the way, was over a year and then only when I told them.