Bank Closures: Rural Areas

James Naish Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

I admire my right hon. Friend’s perseverance in ever trying to change the signatory on a charity bank account. People have died of boredom and exasperation trying to do it. A 60-year-old has to turn up with their great grandparents, their first cat and everything else to prove who they are. The fact that the bank has known them as a private customer for years seems to pass it by.

I hope I have made my points to the Minister, but let me rehearse them very briefly in bullet point form. One concerns the rubric to defend a bank closure. The assessment of access to cash needs a rural dimension, and there needs to be a much more granular understanding of the hub-and-spoke geography of a rural economy, which is very different from an urban one. We need to move away pretty quickly from merely assessing as satisfactory access to cash as defined by access to an ATM.

We need to turbocharge the delivery of hubs and bring pressure to bear on the banks, and there are a variety to do that. It can be carrot and stick, through tax and other policies, to try to nudge them to move at a faster pace. I hope, however, that the Government will take the lead on social inclusion for our rural areas, reflecting the fact that they have far more small, independent shops and businesses, and that the population is disproportionately older and/or retired and dealing with disabilities, infirmities, frailties and so on. Those things should be taken into account, and I remain to be convinced that they are.

I think an opportunity exists to amend the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 to give the FCA greater powers to look at wider banking services, not just cash. Our rural communities struggle. Our economies are fragile, and wages are usually lower than in urban counterparts. Another bank closure is not just another bank closure in a rural market town.

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Although I welcome banking hubs, I am increasingly concerned that banks see them as an excuse to accelerate the closure of core services. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that pressure needs to be applied, first and foremost, to the banks to keep branches open on the high street, and that banking hubs should remain as an infill as opposed to being seen as the solution? That is the danger when we, as a collective, talk so frequently about banking hubs.

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I think the trend has been pretty clear, and the goalposts have moved. From late 2008 or 2009 through to about 2015 or 2016, I think the Government could and should have been much tougher and more exacting, but we are where we are. I take his point and I understand it, but let us not let the delivery of the good be sacrificed in pursuit of the excellent, which seems unattainable.

I think the trend in what the banks are doing is pretty well set, and it is probably irreversible. All sorts of things play into that. What I think is arrestable is the attitude of, “We will pull out even if we are the last branch open, and somebody else will pick up the slack”—principally the Post Office—or “We expect our customers to travel great distances to find a bank that is open and can help them.” That may require a number of visits in the case of something like an overdraft.

That is where the idea of a hub comes in. I understand that we are due to have our first hub in Dorset at some point this year—in Sherborne, in the constituency of the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello)—but North Dorset needs one as well. I will certainly be campaigning for one in Blandford. I would value the support of the Treasury Bench to emphasise to the banks that they have a duty of care to their customers, and they cannot just cut them adrift and say, “Make your own way. Find an alternative. Beat a path to another branch. It is terribly inconvenient for you, but that is what we are telling you to do, because we have no social responsibility at all.”

For the sake of our rural communities, economy and businesses, for charities and the farming community, and for a host of other people who want that personal interaction because they do not have access to the internet, or do not want to use online banking or an app and so on, there should be a bank teller, as we used to call them, from a bank, in a hub at set times, to help their customers. By so doing they will not damage our rural and market town economies as much as many of us fear, and as many hon. Members have attested to in this short debate.