Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if the Government will bring forward legislative proposals to ensure that post offices provide free access to ATMs when there is no other ATM within 1km of that post office.

The Government recognises that widespread free access to cash remains extremely important to the day-to-day lives of many consumers and businesses in the UK. Government has been engaging and will continue to engage with industry to ensure that this access is maintained.

LINK, the main scheme behind the UK’s ATM network, has assured us that industry is committed to maintaining an extensive network of free-to-use cash machines, and to ensuring that the present geographical spread of ATMs is maintained. LINK intends to bolster its Financial Inclusion Programme, which ensures the provision of ATMs in areas of deprivation, where demand would not otherwise make one viable, and has also committed to protecting all free-to-use ATMs which are a kilometre or more from the next nearest free-to-use ATM.

The Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), which Government set up as an independent regulator in 2015 with a statutory objective to ensure that the UK’s payment systems work in the interests of their users, is monitoring developments within ATM provision, and is conducting ongoing work on the impact that changes may have. The PSR has recently published a summary of their work to date, which can be found at https://www.psr.org.uk/psr-focus/the-UK-ATM-network.

The PSR has committed to using its powers to act should any of the firms it regulates behave in a way that conflicts with its statutory objectives.

99% of UK personal bank accounts and 95% of small business accounts can be accessed to withdraw cash and deposit cash and cheques over the counter in any of the UK’s network of over 11,600 post offices.