Banking Services: Accessibility

Debate between Richard Foord and Andrew George

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the accessibility of banking services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for permitting me the opportunity to raise the issues and concerns about access to banking services across the country and in our communities. These are nationwide concerns, and the issue vexes many MPs and constituents—certainly in my constituency, where a large number of banks have closed in the last decade. Many people, particularly the digitally excluded and the most vulnerable, have been left in extremely difficult circumstances.

My relationship with banking is rather rudimentary, and I hope that those more engaged in debates on banking and financial services will tolerate my rudimentary dialogue on this issue; it is not one of my specialist subjects by any means, as I think will become apparent. Nevertheless, as a Member of Parliament, I have taken a very close interest in this issue, largely provoked by the closure in January this year of a bank in my constituency —in Penzance, west Cornwall. That has had a rather offensive impact on the town.

I am also concerned about the rather high-handed manner in which this closure was carried out, without any consultation—simply an announcement that was then followed through. I was shocked by the impact and many resulting factors of the closure, as well as the dismissive attitude of the bank when it came to that impact on some of the most vulnerable, disabled and digitally excluded people in the community. I have had a nine-year sabbatical from this place; when I was here previously, I did not face these issues as there were not any bank closures. There have been significant closures since. I was surprised at the dialogue and the attitude of the high-street bank—in this case, Lloyds.

I declare an interest in that I was a loyal Lloyds customer until last week; I had been for more than the last half century. I have been so dismayed by the attitude and approach of the bank to this closure that I have withdrawn all my custom and taken it elsewhere, and the bank knows it. The same applies to many in the Penzance area of my constituency.

When it announced the closure, the bank promised the local community a community banker who would come for one day every fortnight into a public building to offer an alternative service to help those people who needed face-to-face banking. I have had the following information from a constituent who attended one of those sessions very recently; they have only just been set up. The hub, held in St John’s Hall, a local authority building in Penzance, consisted of one community banker, with equipment in a very large room; no cash or notes were available, only advice. There were 28 people queueing to see the community banker, waiting in a very public place in an echoey room; there is no confidentiality there. The first two people waiting were in the meeting room for one hour—20 people stayed; eight left because they could not wait any longer.

This person’s wife arrived at 9 am and arrived back home just before 12 midday, having walked to and fro. It was a total shambles, which shows the disregard Lloyds has for people. The next time the community banker arrives, which is apparently now in three weeks’ time, the hub will be held upstairs, which is not good for older and disabled people. The nearby post office at St Clare could not dispense any cash during that time because the system was down, including the cashpoint outside the post office. Lloyds has recently stopped people from cashing cheques at post offices as well, so banking services that should be and have been provided to people have been withdrawn.

According to Fair4All Finance, more than 20 million people across the UK are in “financially vulnerable circumstances”. One in 10 people has no savings, and 21% have less than £1,000 in savings—nearly a third of our population are in extremely financially vulnerable situations: just one or two pay packets away from homelessness. Nearly 2 million people have used an unlicensed lender or loan shark in the last year, and 4.5 million people in financial vulnerability prefer face-to-face banking with a person. The issue has grown in urgency in many parts of the country. Access to in-person banking should be an essential public service. Closures affect people’s financial security, local economies, small business survival, digital inclusion, and the independence and dignity of older and disabled people.

The Minister will no doubt refer to the fact that banking hubs have replaced the banks, which have all been removed from towns, falling like a house of cards. However, having looked at the services available through hubs, I have to say that they are very limited in scope. I wonder about their sustainability in the longer run.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, because so many people in my area of Devon, as well as his area of Cornwall, feel strongly about the issue. Not only are fewer services available when a bank closes its high street branch, but, if they are available a banking hub, they are available only one day per week rather than five. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is in the gift of the Government to reconsider the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, and to look again at the ease with which banks are closing their high street branches?

[Andrew George]

I strongly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. I will come to questions to the Minister in a moment; I believe that the Government need to look at the robustness and sustainability of those services. What has been put in the place of banks is rather flimsy in the longer term, and that represents a risk to the future of financial services, which are essential, particularly for the most vulnerable and digitally excluded in our society.

It is worth reflecting that Members of Parliament using digital technologies perhaps do not entirely comprehend how difficult that is for some people. I am not one of the most IT-savvy people on the planet by any means, so I sympathise with those people to a certain extent. Even when someone gets on top of the electronic capacity required to use electronic services, the services often still contain degrees of linguistic ambiguity that leave even the most intelligent and educated among us rather confused. Unless someone can speak to a human being, that ambiguity remains and the inaccessibility of those services continues as well. It is not just the electronics, but the fact that someone cannot ask anyone who has designed the system what on earth they mean by the options available.

I am surprised that the review of access to financial services has been reduced to an assessment of merely cash. That is what the regulations seem to say. My hon. and gallant Friend suggested that the Government need to look at this again, and I hope they will. The framework designed to protect communities from losing central banking services is far too narrowly focused. Current legislation and regulatory oversight look almost exclusively at access to cash, but needs to look at access to banking, banking advice, account advice and other services. Even Link’s formal assessments openly state that it does not consider access to more complex banking needs. It allows banks to close branches even when communities remain deeply dependent on face-to-face support, as we found in the case of Penzance, which I mentioned earlier.

I ask the Minister to extend the regulatory framework, including the 2023 Act, which my hon. and gallant Friend has referred to already, so that it protects access to banking and not just cash; so that it strengthens and widens the FCA’s role to ensure that local impact, equality analysis and access to banking services more widely are mandatory considerations before closures are permitted to go ahead; so that it requires realistic travel assessments for rural and island communities; so that it improves standards and the roll-out of service standards for banking hubs; and so that it considers proportionate service obligations on banks, not least because these banks are, after all, too big to fail. In 2008, Lloyds was bailed out to the tune of more than £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.

The bank says in its branding that it is “By Your Side”—but apparently only until it finds that to be unsuitable: an empty branding slogan, one is bound to observe. I hope the Minister looks at this issue. It is a matter not of consumer choice, but consumer displacement. Around 14% of adults in financially vulnerable communities in the UK—that is 2.8 million people—live in rural areas, and the rural nature and travel involved need to be considered, too.

Rural Housing Targets

Debate between Richard Foord and Andrew George

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is fascinating to hear my hon. Friend talk about the success of rural exception sites in Cornwall, but elsewhere only 14 of 91 local planning authorities that have a policy of using rural exception sites have actually built houses using the policy. Why does that discrepancy exist?

[Andrew George]

Well—

Old Oak Common Station

Debate between Richard Foord and Andrew George

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. The south-west is a region with enormous untapped economic potential. We already have a brilliant clean energy industry, which is growing. We have a fantastic defence industry, with lots of small and medium-sized enterprises. We have a thriving agricultural sector and a flourishing food sector. We have a tourism industry that welcomes more than 20 million visitors per year. Our economy depends very heavily, with all these things, on reliable transport links.

We in Devon are bucking the trend nationally. Since 2019, the proportion of rail journeys taken across the country has fallen by 6%, but in Devon, it has increased by 9%. Time and again, however, we have seen the west country miss out on rail investment, which has been concentrated in other parts of the country—in the midlands, the north of England and, of course, London. The south-west is left grappling with an underfunded and unreliable rail network.

The construction of Old Oak Common will exacerbate some of those challenges. Over the next decade, passengers travelling on mainline inter-city services serving the south-west will face severe disruption. Planned works will reduce the number of available seats on trains that are already crowded and have slow journey times. We will see a fall in the number of direct services to London Paddington. Last month, the Government pointed to a £30-million mitigation package. That is woefully inadequate. Compare it with the £6.5-billion cost of Old Oak Common —by contrast, £30 million is a pittance. Worryingly, that £30 million has already been committed to operational adjustments such as depot changes and electrification in London, with little or no regard for the south-west.

The Tories’ catastrophic management—or rather, mismanagement—of the rail system was exemplified by the two-year industrial dispute that cost taxpayers an eye-watering £25 million per strike day, and led to reforms that have saddled the public with hundreds of millions of pounds in additional cost. Nowhere is the previous Government’s legacy of transport failure more apparent than in relation to High Speed 2, where flip-flopping over the last 15 or 20 years has led to ballooning costs, neglected communities and misery for passengers.

I want to point out how that has affected people in some west-country communities. It might be supposed that it is only HS2 communities—people in the midlands and the north—who have been affected by some of the cost overruns and the indecision, but that is not so. When we saw the cancellation of HS2 by the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), there was then some big announcement about Network North, and we were promised that HS2 money was therefore going to be ploughed into stations and the redevelopment of stations across the country.

In the constituency I represent, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton came to visit. He hired a community room in a farm shop—a sort of farm shop conference centre. He and other Conservative activists held up British Rail placards with the word “Cullompton” underneath, as if to encourage people that somehow there was money from HS2 that could be invested in our local rail transport. That was absolutely not the case, as has since been revealed. Now we can see that those were all empty promises.

Old Oak Common is one more step in this misadventure, with an additional 20 minutes that it adds to a journey from Paddington to the south-west. That could be enough to influence holidaymakers to choose other destinations overseas, which would be a tragedy for the south-west economy. I really hope that the Government look kindly on proper mitigation.

[Andrew George]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent case, as did our hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson). Of course, his constituency of Honiton and Sidmouth is three and a half hours away from Penzance, so a 20-minute delay for people at Penzance is not necessarily the issue. It is the disruption, the uncertainty and all the other factors on the route that make the current service completely inadequate. That is really why we want to see investment in improvement, to bring the service up.

[Richard Foord]

I recognise the particular plight of my hon. Friend’s constituents, who are as far south-west as one can go in England. My time is up, but I plead with the Minister to think again about the £30-million mitigation fund and whether it really offsets the costs that south-west residents will bear.