Bank Closures: Impact on Rural Communities

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con)]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate deserves our congratulations and thanks for raising this topic, which is crucial to the strength of communities throughout the country and therefore to the country itself. She is not only reverend, she is right.

I declare my interest as a member of the Horizon compensation advisory board. The relevance of that, which will come as no surprise to your Lordships, is that I want to talk about the Post Office.

I believe in the Post Office. Despite all it has done, despite the mayhem and trauma that it has inflicted on sub-postmasters throughout the country and despite the appalling scandal of the Horizon saga, the Post Office is essential to communities up and down the country. I will go so far as to say that I love the Post Office—not because of its management, obviously, nor because of its structure or behaviour, but because of the relationships that sub-postmasters have with their communities. It was those relationships that made the Post Office brand the most trusted brand in the country. Sub-postmasters know their communities: they help pensioners with any issues they might have, they keep an eye out for people who have not been around recently and who therefore might need help, and they hold the community together. They lead the community. That is one of the reasons it was so disgraceful of the Post Office management to use and abuse that most trusted brand in the country to prosecute and persecute the people who had generated that trust.

This debate, for which I again thank the right reverend Prelate, gives me an opportunity to say that the Post Office may form the basis of a wide-ranging solution to the problems that she rightly sets out. The UK’s banking network has worse than halved since 2015. The LINK network says that there are about 3,000 bank branches left. The Minister for Small Businesses, speaking in another place last week, said that we are below 5,000. Either way, it is not enough.

Age UK has briefed your Lordships on how this hits the elderly particularly hard. The elderly may be less digitally adroit than younger people, they may need to be protected from online scams, they may rely more on cash and they may need face-to-face advice. The solution to these issues is the Post Office. The Government have the ambition of banking hubs and they are rolling out 350 of them, over 100 of which are already up and running. That is excellent, but it is not ambitious enough.

Hubs are the key to holding communities together. Those hubs could—and in my opinion should—include not just banking but social interaction. They could include that essential ingredient of all civilised life: coffee, and even cake. Over the coffee and cake, people could meet to discuss what to do if they feel digitally excluded. They could bring their laptops in and work out how to upgrade them and how to protect themselves from scams. They could access all manner of government services, local and national, and possibly even other services, including driving licences and powers of attorney. They could work out how to deal with planning applications and they could buy things—and not just coffee and cake. Perhaps there could be a health centre hub—so they could be told they were drinking too much coffee. All of this would be not just a major step forward in relation to convenience but good for the resilience of the country. Resilience is the new black.

A couple of years ago, I chaired a Select Committee which examined risk planning and management. We found that the key to dealing with risk is general resilience and that resilience is most in evidence when it is bolstered and disseminated by strong communities. If the Post Office is about anything, it is about communities

The last thing the Government should be doing, as sadly happened in November, is closing post offices. As banks close their branches, we need more post offices, not fewer. We need bigger post offices, with the wonderful sub-postmasters getting back to their rightful role as leaders and enablers of their strong communities.