Banks and their duty to keep branches open

FOR many older customers and small business owners who deal mainly in cash, the closure of the last bank in their town or village can be a traumatic event.

It also leaves a massive hole in the High Street. People often visit the town centre to pay bills or collect money at the bank and while there, do their shopping. Losing the branch means there is one less reason to come into town and local trade suffers a huge blow.

So the news that the biggest lenders are now closing local branches at the staggering rate of ten per week is a cause for deep concern. More than 550 will be axed this year, in addition to the 1,000 shut down in the previous two years.

By the end of 2017, there will be fewer than 6,000 left and, if closures continue at the same rate, a decade from now there will be no more than a token scattering across the country.

The banks say they are shedding branches – and many thousands of jobs – because most customers now bank and pay their bills online.

This may be so but there are still millions to whom internet banking is a strange and alien concept. They mistrust digital transactions, believing it makes them more vulnerable to fraud (which of course it does) and prefer to deal with real people.

And what of small shopkeepers who need to deposit cash every day? Without a local branch, they have little choice other than to shut up shop in peak trading hours and drive to another town, or take on extra staff.

Whatever happened to customer service? True, there is a growing shift towards internet banking, but don’t the banks have a responsibility to those who are not ready or able yet to embrace it? Don’t they deserve some consideration?

Following the PPI, Libor and Forex scandals, the reputation of big banks is at an all-time low. And of course it’s just nine years since their greed and recklessness brought the whole financial system crashing to the ground.

They survived bankruptcy only because the ordinary taxpayer bailed them out to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. So instead of axing branches in the headlong pursuit of ever greater profits, perhaps they might show some gratitude by giving the public what it wants – at least one bank in every town and village.