How Battle won a victory in fight to keep cash
STROLLING down the busy high street of Battle in East Sussex on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, it is hard to imagine this town was the site of one of the most important and bloody conflicts in the history of Britain. The epic Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Scores of tourists crowd its streets that are framed either side by tea shops, antiques centres, butchers, grocers and bakers.
It is almost impossible to imagine how English King Harold was shot in the eye with an arrow a few yards from where I am standing. The event changed the course of history when William the Conqueror of Normandy took control of the country.
But I am also struggling to get to grips with a more modern conundrum – why every bank has cleared out of this historic town, in the process ripping out all their ATMs as they fled for the hills.
All that remains on the ‘banking’ front is a small branch of Nationwide Building Society with a cash machine inside – and a grocery store, home to a post office and ATM. I scratch my head in amazement. Am I missing a trick?
Helen Barker is chairwoman of the town’s chamber of commerce. She has just scored a small victory for Battle by persuading ATM network Link to install a brand new cash machine in the town.
An ATM that unlike the ones sitting inside Nationwide and the grocers, will be accessible to residents and tourists 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
It is to be positioned in the outside wall of the grand old building that was home to NatWest until it slammed shut its doors in May last year.
The property is now derelict. A window upstairs is cracked and the outside clock is stuck at 4.25pm. The new ATM, says Barker, will be installed ‘by the end of the year’ when a nearby Costa Coffee gets relocated into the bank’s premises.
Barker now runs local craft shop The Crafty Norman. She says: ‘We had an outside cash machine when I ran the local post office in my shop. But it was removed when the post office was relocated up the road four years ago. We got a replacement from NoteMachine but it was going to cost us £800 a year to maintain. The numbers just did not stack up.’ Yet Barker refused to be defeated. Earlier this year, she signed up to a new initiative where Link promised to install 50 cash machines across Britain for communities abandoned by banks and the post office.
Sadly, the £1 million idea will not stop the rot of cash machine closures – being axed at the rate of 300 a month – but it does provide some communities with an opportunity for an ATM to be installed.
There are currently about 50,000 free-to-use cash machines countrywide. A further 11,000 fee-charging ATMs are installed in shops, typically charging £ 1 to access cash. A key reason why so many ATMs are closing is because bank branches are shutting at the rate of 55 a month, taking their cash machines with them. Only about 11,000 bank and building society branches survive.
The scars of ripped- out cash machines and shut banks are all too evident on Battle’s high street. Barclays went four years ago and is now an estate agent. Opposite the closed NatWest, a holein-the-wall is covered with a rusty iron plate. Further down the road, Lloyds is now a coffee shop. A couple of doors away, HSBC is now a vacant shop. Its cash machine has been replaced by an inch-thick square of flaking plywood. Battle is nothing but resilient.
The imposing 9th Century Battle Abbey looks out on the streets with bunting that celebrates the festival of arts and music that runs throughout this month. Colourful street art adorns the town, including half a dozen painted animals known as ‘Battle Beasts’.
Local artist Kerry Bennett, 54, who decorated one of the ‘Beasts’, says: ‘Taking away our accessible cash machines has been disastrous for the community and businesses that rely on tourists spending cash. Sales of my paintings have plummeted since the last outside ATM was pulled out a year ago.’ Although the imminent arrival of a new cash machine is welcome, some believe it is a PR stunt organised by the banking industry to draw attention away from the removal of ATMs.
Ron Delnevo is director of the ATM Industry Association and runs website Cash- is- Cool. He says: ‘Link’s initiative does nothing to halt the tsunami of bank and ATM closures. The sticking plaster gimmick of providing a few more ATMs is not good enough. More than £173 billion in cash was withdrawn from ATMs last year. This shows that whatever the banks may say, demand for hard cash remains strong.’ John Howells, chief executive of Link, says: ‘While ATM closures are not a problem for urban areas where alternative cash machines are available, they are for rural areas. We are determined to protect people’s access to cash.’
Link has already earmarked ten places, apart from Battle, for one of the 50 cash machines. They are countrywide, including Deal and Margate in Kent; Ebbw Vale in Blaenau Gwent; Bungay in Suffolk; and Nuneaton in Warwickshire.
The Mail on Sunday has drawn up a ‘Keep Our Cash’ manifesto. Among the demands we make are that every town should have at least one bank, a free cash machine and post office. For smaller communities without a bank, post office or free cash machine, ‘cashback’ must be offered for free at shops and pubs.