Savers who queued all day to rescue their cash
AFTER THE CRASH 10 YEARS OF PAIN
WHEN David Kirsch queued with hundreds of others to take his money out of Northern Rock a decade ago, he didn’t realise that banking as he knew it was about to change for good.
David, 82, was the last person to be served on September 14, 2007, at his local branch in Golders Green, North London.
He’d waited in line for around two hours — and after serving him staff shut the door and turned everyone else away. ‘Lots of people were panicking — I was lucky to get in,’ he says.
‘I only planned to take out the amount that was over the limit protected by the Government, which was £35,000 at that time. But I was told it was all or nothing, so I asked for all of it to be transferred to another bank.’
David, a retired accountant, says many in the queue were unaware of how bad the situation was.
‘I remember a dear old lady, barely able to walk with a stick queuing to make a deposit,’ he says. ‘She was being very vocal about how it was all a fuss about nothing.’
David now banks with another High Street name. ‘I am sure our bank will not fail and have no worries about having our savings held there,’ he says. ‘The real issue is the terrible savings rates offered by banks — but that’s another story.’
In the years that followed these desperate scenes outside Northern Rock branches many historic names, such as Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley and Britannia disappeared from the High Street for ever as they were taken over by larger institutions or bailed out by the Government.
Branches were shut in a bid to save cash and thousands of bank workers lost their jobs.
Today there are an estimated 8,978 branches across the UK, compared with 12,270 in 2007.
Many of those shut were the last branch in town, leaving around 1,500 communities without a bank.
This means thousands of elderly customers in rural areas must now travel miles to their nearest branch to deposit cheques and pay bills. And more still are closing — around ten branches every day.
Brian Brown, head of insight at financial information business Defaqto, says: ‘The Northern Rock collapse marked the beginning of a new era. Since then there has been a massive reduction in the number of branches as banks and building societies had to cut costs, with customers increasingly being pushed towards digital banking.’
At the time of Northern Rock’s demise, new technology was beginning to emerge that would transform the way we spend and manage our money today.
In June 2007 — a couple of months before the run on the bank — the then Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in San Francisco.
It took several more years for smartphones to become commonplace, and in 2011 UK customers were able to download the first banking app from First Direct.
Today. nearly 20 million of us regularly use smartphones to manage our bank accounts.
David Kirsch and his wife Jo, 79, rarely have cause to step into a bank branch today.
‘We do everything online,’ he says. ‘Our income from pensions is paid into our accounts automatically and anything else we need to do is done on the computer.’ But not everyone is comfortable with the shift to the internet.
Carol Purvis, 81, refuses to bank online because she is worried about fraud. Fortunately, she still has a Lloyds Bank near to where she lives in Rowlands Gill, Tyne & Wear, but it’s a lot quieter than it used to be.
Carol says she misses the days when the Post Office she ran with her late husband, Ron, was a hive of activity at the centre of village life.
‘On a Thursday, there would be queues of people coming to pick up their pensions and maybe a packet of Pontefract liquorice, too. The customers would talk to me about their children and I’d even be invited to their weddings.
‘Now everything is paid directly into people’s accounts and they pay all their bills online, we have lost some of those interactions.’
The way we spend our money has also changed dramatically over the past decade. We are now so comfortable with paying by plastic that card payments are predicted to overtake cash by the end of next year, according to the trade body Payments UK.
It was also in 2007 that Barclaycard launched the first contactless payment card, OnePulse, allowing customers to tap and pay on the London Underground and in 6,000 shops around the country.
Today around two-thirds of shoppers tap and spend at 450,000 contactless terminals in the UK.