ATM Closures

Ruth George Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ged Killen]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He makes an excellent point about the existing pressure on our high streets. Removing ATMs and other services does not help that pressure one bit.

LINK has now been given a specific direction by the PSR to review its financial inclusion programme, due to its failure to protect the spread of free-to-use ATMs. However, I have little confidence in the regulation of the sector. LINK’s changes to ATM funding were the PSR’s first major regulatory hurdle. In my view and that of many stakeholders, it fell at that hurdle. Common themes related to the reporting of issues and access to the financial inclusion programme have been reported by those involved in the industry pretty much since day one. I sat across from the PSR and explained the concerns I had heard about the closure of free-to-use ATMs and about their operators, and from the many people who are against the cut to LINK’s interchange fee, and I was met with silence. On every occasion when concerns were raised, the PSR failed to act. Only latterly has it taken action.

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward this important debate. My very rural constituency is similarly affected. When I met the PSR, I found its attitude was, “Wait and see whether there are any problems, and then we might think about acting.” Does he agree that that is not the correct attitude for a regulator to take when it has such a weight of evidence before it that there will be problems?

[Ged Killen]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When I met the PSR, it seemed wholly satisfied with listening to what LINK, rather than everyone else involved in the industry, had to say about the issue. That was surprising and disappointing.

The closure of free-to-use ATMs highlights the significant problem we have with the way access to cash is managed in the UK. There seems to be no effective oversight of the issue, and responsibility sits across numerous Departments, regulators and private companies. We need a regulator to have the powers to take a rounded view and implement effective measures that will ensure access to cash is protected. It seems likely that the PSR either does not have the power it needs or has not utilised fully and effectively the abilities it has. I should be grateful if the Minister would comment on that.

We are in a transition towards a cashless society, but we are not there yet. We need to be careful about how the transition is managed. Most importantly, we have to think about the impact on people who still rely on cash. Access to cash remains an important part of many of our constituents’ lives. Research from Which? has highlighted the fact that four in five people said that access to the free-to-use network was important in their daily lives and in paying for goods and services. Removing free access to cash would leave one in 10 people struggling to make payments, and would shut many consumers out of local shops and services.

We also need to think about what happens when the technology fails or in the case of hacking. This year the Visa payment system crashed and there were major online banking issues for TSB customers, many of whom of course did not have a local branch to visit as an alternative. The experience of other countries further along the journey towards a cash-free society, such as Sweden, where there has been a huge rise in the number of places that simply will not accept cash, is that there are now serious concerns about the lack of cash in the economy, so that the Government are looking at ways of addressing that retrospectively.