Access to Cash

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I congratulate the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) on a highly informed and amusing contribution.

I am going to make two points. It is very simple: all of us need cash. As some right hon. and hon. Members know, my wife is disabled. When I go away on a Sunday or Monday—or possibly on a Tuesday, in a good week—to come here, she gets on okay by herself during the week. One thing she always asks me to do is get cash. On the days before I leave to come south, I have to go to the cash machine and get out £70 or £80. That is how life is; she needs that money.

In recent weeks, we heard the sickening announcement that Virgin Money is going to close its branch in Wick. That leaves one bank in the big royal burgh of Wick, Caithness. It is a sickening litany of closures in what I think is the furthest constituency from London on the British mainland. I listened with amusement to the idea of 1 km. Hon. members from Wales are correct that the mountains do get in the way. In the entire county of Sutherland, a geographical area of 5,250 sq km, we have only one branch in Golspie. That is the nature of the problem. My constituents are sick and tired of it. Each time they hear the news again, there is a sadness about the whole issue.

However, in fairness to the Government, good experimental work has been done. Trials have been carried out with idea of banking at post office hubs, which have been well received. I say to the Minister and the Government, push on, forge ahead with those hubs. Some of the remoter constituencies in England, Wales, the and the highlands and other parts of Scotland, such as the constituency of the right hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Jack), would be the perfect places to experiment with those hubs, because rurality militates against access to cash.

I have one final point, and I will be brief, Mrs Miller, to help you. I am going to repeat slightly a speech I made yesterday about post office closures. I talked about a fishing village called Balintore in Easter Ross. The local shop said, “We can’t work with the post office any longer. It’ll have to go.” The community, particularly the hall committee of the Seaboard Memorial Hall, got together and talked to the post office. Hey presto, we have a post office back in the village, although it will be temporary.

My final message to the Minister and the Government is that they should work as closely as they can with the communities that are involved, because very often they will come up with an innovative suggestion, even down to basic routes for mobile banks, the best times to visit communities, and the best ways to get such hubs up and running. I speak with passion because, on behalf of my constituents, I am so heartily sick of seeing my vast constituency drained of access to cash.

[David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller, and to take part in another debate on access to cash. I commend the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) not just for securing the debate, but for setting out the issues. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) for his passion on this issue, which he has pursued relentlessly in Parliament and with the Minister. The Minister has always offered good grace and helpful engagement, but as my hon. Friend intimated, we are at the crunch point and need action.

In her contribution, the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) touched on something that the Minister and I have not always agreed on. I feel that the Government have not done enough to convey the message that cash is safe. During the covid crisis, cash was no less safe than using a PIN pad and terminal. The Bank of England and many other international authorities confirmed that, and I do not think a clear enough message was given out that cash was safe. We also know that many retailers and other service providers have just used covid as an excuse to move to cashless payments, rather than there being some safety or security issue.

As we have discussed, the issues of acceptance and access are interlinked. Of course, the third key issue is the ability to deposit cash, which remains incredibly important for many voluntary and smaller organisations. To give an example from my local community, people do not go to coffee mornings, when they are allowed again, with their iPhones.

[Jamie Stone]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way—he is an old friend indeed. Does he agree that there is an additional safety aspect to somebody having to travel a long distance with a lot of cash on them?

[David Mundell]

Indeed I do, and I think the hon. Member for Pontypridd made those comments in her opening remarks. We have to have the three elements: access, acceptance and the ability to deposit. Like the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), I have a very large constituency—in fact, it is the largest constituency in the United Kingdom outside the highlands—where many of these issues of rurality are to the fore, so the issue of the 1 km within a rural context has to be properly addressed. We also have to have a better understanding of how engagement with post offices will work.

I remain very concerned about the post office network. I recently had four post office closures in significant communities, because a well-known retailer decided that it would no longer have post offices within its premises. Just glibly saying that the post office has a role might be right, but it is not as simple as that. We need to understand the basis on which it will underpin the availability of cash. I welcome the progress since the last debate, and I hope that we can achieve the same level of progress in the coming weeks, with a response to the White Paper and an understanding of the timescale. As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys said about the crunch, the banks have to put up or shut up. If they do not put up, we have to take the necessary action here in Parliament.