Northern Ireland Banknote (Designation of Authorised Bank) Regulations 2020

Lord Caine Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity to take part in this short debate. I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Penn on her appointment to the Front Bench. I shall keep my comments brief but, first, I associate myself with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, regarding the victims and survivors of the Troubles—an issue with which I grappled, not entirely successfully, over many years at the Northern Ireland Office. I also welcome the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, who said that the United Kingdom is better together. That has to include Northern Ireland.

As my noble friend made clear in her opening remarks, the SI itself is a technical requirement made necessary by restructuring at Ulster Bank Ltd and within the RBS Group, so I have no issue at all with it. Instead, I wish to refer to one issue: the continuing practical difficulties encountered by people travelling from Northern Ireland to the rest of the United Kingdom, who then try to pay for goods and services with banknotes issued within Northern Ireland.

I suspect that, with the possible exception of some noble Lords from Northern Ireland, over the past decade I have made the journey between Northern Ireland and Great Britain more than anybody else speaking in this debate. It was usually every week, and frequently more often. I am therefore well used to having Northern Ireland banknotes nestling alongside Bank of England notes in my wallet, and to the problems that one can have in using them. Thankfully, my excellent local pub in south London, the “Rosendale”, which I hope at some point I might even see again, is managed by a gentleman from Castlederg and his husband. Northern Ireland banknotes are therefore very welcome and I have disposed of many of them in there. Regrettably, at my local pub here in Yorkshire, which I also hope to visit again soon, that is far from the case; they are simply not accepted.

The immediate retort from people who are refused is usually to say that these notes are legal tender. As the noble Lord, Lord Wood, pointed out, they are not legal tender but they are of course legal currency. Herein lies the problem. In Great Britain, Northern Ireland banknotes are too often met with bewilderment and a complete lack of understanding as to their status. A few years ago, a Which? survey found that over half the respondents had experienced difficulties spending Scottish or Northern Ireland banknotes in England and Wales, and over one quarter had been refused service altogether. I can remember once trying to change a Northern Ireland tenner for a Bank of England note in a branch of Lloyds Bank in Leeds, only to be asked by the cashier whether I knew the exchange rate as she could not find it listed. I could share many other anecdotes, but I think I have made the point.

Might my noble friend therefore ask her Treasury officials and the Bank of England to look at whether anything more could be done to clear up some of the confusion that exists? While I fully appreciate that this might not be the most pressing issue facing the Treasury at the moment, once life returns to a more normal pattern it is something that many people in Northern Ireland would appreciate. With that, I support the regulations.