Pennies are safe for now
WHILE I’m not the sort of person who reuses tea bags, drinks out of jam jars or extracts my own teeth I do have a thrifty side. So I’m reeling from the revelation that as many as one in 12 copper coins is thrown in the bin by people who don’t want it putting their pockets out of shape or weighing down their handbags. Money, literally, thrown away. Crazeee.
This is why Chancellor Philip “Tigger” Hammond has launched a review of cash in the economy to see “whether the current denominational mix of coins meets the public’s needs”. And for a bad moment on Wednesday it looked as though 1p and 2p coins were going to be shown the door. The threat of a thermonuclear showdown with Russia paled into insignificance as the very real prospect of doing away with our copper coinage hit home.
But for now at least a jittery public has been reassured that pennies are safe. Which is a big relief for have we not always been told that if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves?
Yet even those of us who can pass a rubbish bin without succumbing to the urge to chuck a handful of shrapnel in it are still not making use of our pennies. Six in 10 copper coins are only used in one transaction and then presumably stowed away in that plastic tub you keep for that very purpose in the kitchen drawer. You always mean to swap them at the bank for some proper money but, you know, the decades pass. And were you aware that under the Coinage Act 1971, 1p and 2p coins are only legal tender up to a maximum of 20p for a single transaction?
So let’s face facts. The writing is on the wall, not just for pennies but for cash itself. It used to only be the Queen who never carried cash but now nobody under 30 does. With contactless payment you don’t even have to remember a pin number.
ONCE, card payments for anything under a tenner were either not allowed or a cause of embarrassment. What kind of loser pays for a newspaper with a Barclaycard? Those in the queue behind would roll their eyes. No longer. Now as I fiddle around in my purse scraping together the exact amount for some small payment I sense the same restless irritation. Why, they’re wondering, doesn’t the old girl pay with her card and get a move on? Cash is no longer king. It’s not even a baronet. My theory is that cash, far from being the fuddy-duddy preference, is actually the revolutionary and anarchic option. Pay with a card and everyone knows what you’re up to: HMRC, Google, Amazon, the Russkies, fraudsters. Pay with cash and you’re invisible, you slip under the radar. It’s one of the last ways left to us of sticking it to the man.