My Lords, I support the amendment, although if it is pressed to a vote I will not be voting for it. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, will understand.
I take this opportunity to press my noble friend the Minister to clarify, when she responds, the welcome advice given by the Treasury over the summer that any customer living in a rural area should be no further than three miles from a bank branch. This begs the question: why have Barclays and, presumably, other banks, taken this opportunity to undergo another raft of rural bank closures exactly when the Government have announced that rural customers should have the right to be within three miles of a branch?
3.45 pm
I declare an interest. The branch where I opened my first bank account is now closing. It will not affect me so much, since I can visit other, more urban branches, as long as they survive. However, it concerns me, for the reasons that the noble Baroness so eloquently set out. We are living in a time of cost of living concerns. Cash is king. One way of controlling household expenditure is by relying on cash rather than credit cards. The Government also said in the recent Treasury advice that in the event of a bank closure, rural banking hubs will be set up. I have looked into this for the closure of the branch in question, and the hub will not be like for like. There is a rural post office service in UTASS, the Upper Teesdale advisory service of which I am proud to be a patron, but it is open for fewer than six hours a week. UTASS is looking to open a bank facility for between four and six hours a week.
As the noble Baroness so eloquently set out, my point is that there will be no daily post office facility. There will now be no bank facility on the three days a week that is currently offered. The distance involved is 10 miles from the village to the market town, but 10 miles in the other direction up a dale. The distances are great. I accept that the advice given by the Treasury was that it should be within one mile in an urban area but three miles in a rural area. Rural transport is thin compared with urban transport and it will be very difficult for people. One wonders whether they will be able-bodied enough to access transport to a 10-mile radius.
The Government have identified and acted upon a problem, but my concern is that now banks are flouting the very advice that the Government have given. Will my noble friend take this opportunity to give the strongest possible message to Barclays and other banks that they must continue to provide a banking service to those who live in rural areas—not just for ordinary customers but to rural businesses? On a bank holiday weekend, their takings, over and above the usual weekends
and weeks, will be considerable, and they will have to travel some distance once this closure has taken place in order to bank that money, posing a security problem as well.
With those few remarks, I look forward very much indeed to my noble friend’s response.