Budget Resolutions

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

I welcome this Budget and the difference that it will make to families who have endured the cost of living crisis for far too long. I welcome the £150 cut to energy bills from April—a lifeline for households that have stretched every pound as far as it will go. I welcome the freeze on rail fares, because for many families even a small rise means a choice between essentials. I welcome the uplift in the national living wage and the minimum wage—a long-overdue recognition of the people whose work keeps our economy alive but who rarely see that reflected in their pay packets. These measures help. They are real, they are practical and they will be felt immediately in constituencies such as mine.

However, every week in Mitcham and Morden I meet people who tell me the same thing: the only way they can manage the cost of living is by going back to cash—cash to budget, cash to separate the heating money from the food money, cash because a contactless tap can feel like losing control. Despite the fact that nearly one in five people now rely on cash to manage their household finances, access to cash and face-to-face banking facilities is becoming rarer for the people who need those things most.

We are seeing an unprecedented number of bank branch closures. Lloyds Banking Group recently announced 136 closures between 2025 and 2026. That would have meant Mitcham losing its last bank this coming January. The closure sparked an access to cash review by Link—an assessment of our suitability for a banking hub. We met every criterion for a banking hub except one: the nearest full-service bank must be more than 15 minutes away by public transport. Mitcham has 115 shops and 48,000 people living near the high street, but the Transport for London timetable determined that we could not have a banking hub because it took only 14 minutes by bus to the nearest bank.

What was there to do but galvanise the great people of my constituency into getting on the bus and recording it? Those recordings clearly showed that the bus took between 18 and 20 minutes to get to Tooting, so we have had those decisions reversed. Mitcham will get the first banking hub in south-west London and only the fifth in London. In the coming days, I will work with Cash Access UK to discuss the next steps for our new banking hub, and with the local community to ensure that the hub fits our needs.

I raise all this to say to Members that the criteria for banking hubs, which I hear discussed all the time by Members of all parties, do not meet the needs of the suburban and urban areas that are losing their banks. The Government should reconsider the target of creating 350 new banking hubs in the next year. On behalf of all my colleagues, I ask for that number to grow, because people do not just need Budget measures; they need a way to manage their budgets through the use of cash.