While that sounds frustrating, I also could not get a bank account in the UK when I studied there, and my wife had to go to maybe 10 different banks in France to find one which would open an account for a foreigner when she lived there for a while.
We spent close to a year preparing to live in the UK as students for 8 months, emailing universities and city councils and so on. Moving to a new country is full of that sort of thing in general.