Future of ATMs

Debate between Simon Hoare and Robert Jenrick

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, which I hope I will be able to answer over the course of my speech. One of the motivations for LINK and the industry’s actions is to reduce modestly the number of ATMs in those areas with the greatest density, including cities such as London, but their pledge to the Government and to consumers, which I will go on to talk about, is that that will not be to the detriment of those in rural areas, market towns or harder-to-serve areas, which are not exclusively rural but could be areas of greater deprivation, even in cities such as London. We have had a fairly strong promise from LINK and from the regulator that there will be no detriment to rural areas. I will come on in a moment to how that will be enforced in practice.

We all recognise that there is a decline in the use of cash, which is making it harder to maintain our current level of free access to cash. That is the challenge that the changes hope to address. I appreciate that we have to view the issue through the lens of bank branch closures, which affects my constituents and those of most Members across the House. The Government, the financial services industry and the regulator therefore have to act to ensure that the needs of the consumer continue to be met. My comments, on behalf of the Government, represent consumers, not the regulator or LINK. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset is absolutely right that we in this House represent the consumers, and their interests must be our primary concern.

Secondly, I wish to address exactly how we do that, which brings me to the particular role played to date by the Payment Systems Regulator and the role it will play in the future, if it lives up to the Government’s expectations. In November, LINK—the main payment scheme behind the UK’s ATM network—launched a consultation on reducing interchange fees by 20%. As I have said, that was designed to reduce the duplication of cash machines in city centres while protecting the more isolated machines. That is the organisation’s stated objective, to which we will hold it to account. At the time, the Government and many Members of this House were clear that any changes must not have a harmful impact on consumers. If machines are lost in cities, the impact should be generally imperceptible, and if they are lost in rural and harder-to-serve areas, they should be replaced, wherever possible.

[Simon Hoare]

I agree with my hon. Friend about the overprovision of ATMs in a city centre environment, but I just want to make sure that he is alert to the fact that ATM providers—the Cardtronics of this world—often use the moneys they secure from such machines to subsidise rural provision. In effect, they are cross-accounting. The opportunity to use that cross-subsidy spare fund will, in effect, disappear as a result of a diminution of ATMs in large cities. That is one of the big problems.

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend raises an important point to which the regulator must pay close attention, but it estimates that the impact of the changes will be modest, even in city centres with a heavy density of ATMs. The main operators of card machines—the companies he mentioned earlier—are generally financially successful. This industry has more than £1 billion of revenue a year, and its market caps are between £500 million and £1.5 billion. Generally speaking, these sizable businesses are in sound financial health. There is no reason to believe that the changes will alter that, although the regulator must bear that factor in mind.

The PSR, which the Government established to deal with such difficult issues, has taken the lead in examining the area. It has engaged with LINK and held a consultation. My hon. Friend raised concerns about the scope of that consultation, but the PSR believes that it has engaged with MPs, although perhaps not as much as it could have done. It has spoken to a number of different parties across the country—indeed, future consultations could learn lessons from the number of individuals and parties to whom it chose to reach out.

The PSR has come back with three requirements that LINK’s proposals must fulfil. First, there is a commitment by LINK to do “whatever it takes”—we must remember those words—to protect the broad geographical spread of free-to-use ATMs. Secondly, any cuts in the interchange must be incremental, and at just 5% in the first year. There will be a review after one year, so in July next year there will be a review before the next cut of 5% could, or would, be implemented. I have received assurances from LINK and the PSR that no further cuts will take place unless they are satisfied that there has been no significant material detriment to the rural and harder-to-serve areas. Thirdly, there will be a greater than ever focus on financial inclusion, and LINK will continue filling gaps in the network and protecting those ATMs in areas that are harder to serve.

LINK will maintain all free-to-use ATMs that are a kilometre or more from the next or nearest free-to-use ATM, including where a community loses ATM access because of a branch closure. LINK will increase the subsidy for ATMs in areas with poor cash access to keep free-to-use machines going. It will conduct an annual review not just in the first year but, if the changes continue, every year thereafter. That review will consider the impact of the interchange fee reduction on the provision of free-to-use ATMs as phased in over the four-year period, and take action as and when required.

LINK has promised to place a page on its website from 1 July that will have sufficient specificity for every Member of the House to look at their constituency. It will show every free ATM across the country, so MPs will be able to view availability in their part of the world. The website will highlight any areas where free ATM availability is in danger of being lost and state what action is being taken to tackle that. For example, my hon. Friend will be able to look up the ATM that we have heard about in his constituency and see whether it is in danger and what action is being taken to address that. That is important to ensure that MPs and people across the country—including those local councillors who were mentioned—can continue to monitor and ensure that LINK lives up to its promises.

Finally, the way that the PSR will police LINK’s commitments can, and should, be stringent. We set the PSR up in 2015 with a specific statutory objective to ensure that the interests of the users of payment systems—not those of the banks—are promoted, with robust powers to enforce that. We expect the PSR to step in and act if needed. I have spoken to the PSR and to LINK, and the PSR understands the importance that the Government place on free access to cash, and the strength of feeling in Parliament and the country. Both organisations have made an explicit commitment to do whatever it takes to maintain the network and provide an additional subsidy per ATM at whatever level is required, to ensure that any machine that is in danger of being lost is replaced by another within a reasonable distance.

In conclusion, I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset for raising this important issue that affects my constituents and people across the country. I have been assured by LINK and the PSR that the motivation for these changes is to ensure that the proliferation of ATMs in urban areas is sustainable, and that we continue to have a free-to-use ATM network—an important issue for the whole country and one that sets it apart from many others—but not at the cost of harder-to-serve areas: the rural areas and the market towns. The promise made to me by LINK is that it will do whatever it takes. The pledge has been made to me by the regulator that it will robustly hold LINK to account for that. The Treasury and I will be watching both very hard to ensure that those pledges are fulfilled on behalf of the people of the country.

Question put and agreed to.

Rural Policing and Hare Coursing

Debate between Simon Hoare and Robert Jenrick

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I echo the thanks and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) on raising this important issue. Although some people might view the debate and the problem as merely an issue of animal welfare and wildlife crime, which of course it is, as others have suggested, it goes much wider than that. We are talking about vandalism of property; loss of income for farmer and landowner; theft, atrocity and intimidation of farmers, their families and in some instances gamekeepers and others employed on estates; and a lot of road traffic issues, including the driving of unlicensed and uninsured vehicles, driving while disqualified and so forth. This all adds up to the picture of criminality that my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) alluded to in his intervention.

My constituency is easily split between east and west. The western part of North Dorset is the Blackmore Vale, which has heavy clay, and nobody would try to course on that. The hares do not like it, and it is too heavy to make a form; sometimes even a 4x4 will get stuck in the clay of Blackmore Vale. Cranborne Chase on the eastern side of my constituency, however, is beautiful, undulating chalk downland, very similar to the area at the border with Wiltshire. It is, of course, an ideal and fertile ground for illegal hare coursing, and it happens on all too regular a basis.

My hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) talked about the chief constable of Essex blaming the robustness of his colleague in Lincolnshire for transporting a problem across a county border. In Dorset, we have also seen an element of that, given the significant success that the chief constable and officers of Wiltshire have had in clamping down in that county. The problem has merely translocated over the border to us.

I agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury said with regard to value of the sighthound used for this purpose. I was told by one of my local police officers that, having confiscated a telephone from a hare courser, he looked—I could not tell the House why—at the gentleman’s photo album on his phone. He had 184 photographs: 20 of his family and 164 of his dog. That, I think, demonstrates the importance and value that these people place on their livestock. The problem is exactly as my hon. Friend suggested. Local authorities have pulled away from taking stray dogs off the street and have contracted it out, often on narrowly defined contracts. The police do not have kennels to house these dogs. I would prefer a far more robust approach, not just in the provision of kennels but in the removal and permanent confiscation of dogs and their rehousing.

[Robert Jenrick]

Last year in Scotland was, I think, the first time that a hare courser or a group of hare coursers were prosecuted successfully and imprisoned using DNA evidence taken from a confiscated dog. We have heard in the debate about the scale and importance of these crimes, so perhaps the police elsewhere in the country should look to take that forward.

[Simon Hoare]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The deployment of technologies that may have been advanced for other purposes can easily be used for exactly the sort of incident my hon. Friend suggests.

I want to draw the attention of the House, if I may, to the excellent work undertaken by the Dorset constabulary in this area under the leadership of Martyn Underhill, our police and crime commissioner, and the chief constable. After discussions with me as a Member of Parliament, we now have a dedicated rural team—and not in name only. The team has the right vehicles—4x4s and Polarises—telephones, equipment and so on. It is doing a fantastic job. It was my pleasure, if that is the word, to join them on a night operation ranging from 8 o’clock in the evening to two o’clock in the morning, where a collaboration of three police forces—officers from Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire—came together with local farmers and gamekeepers. I was obviously the “heavy” man brought in for intimidation. We drove around the countryside using intelligence and telephones to identify where people might be and disrupting activity as it was about to unfold: the interception and interruption of illegal activity taking place in our countryside.

A number of hon. Friends mentioned intimidation. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury provided statistics on the number of people brought to court and the rather lenient slap-on-the-wrist fines. If someone is prepared to wager £10,000 on one greyhound getting a hare, a fine of £276 is but a drop in the ocean. I wonder, as I often do in these circumstances, whether our local magistrates feel intimidated, given the reputation of a lot of people involved in hare coursing knowing no bounds to the retribution they wish to see. I hope our magistrates are made of strong and robust stuff, but that might not necessarily always be the case.

I again congratulate Dorset constabulary on its work. I echo entirely the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury that the funding requirement is, as so often in our rural areas, very bespoke. If one talked to councillors in Manchester, Bristol or Birmingham about rural crime on farms as a result of hare coursing, they would probably scratch their heads and look very bemused, but it causes a great loss of income, great degradation of the countryside, a vast amount of cruelty and a huge amount of illegality. These niche issues that need to be policed with robustness, intelligence and co-ordination do need to find, in our rural policing and its funding formula, an identification of how best to marry funds with the very clear demands elucidated by my hon. Friend in what has been an excellent debate.