Missing: 145m old pound coins

AROUND 145million ‘old- style’ £1 coins have still not been returned to the Royal Mint.

People are being urged to root behind the sofa to find these coins – which have not been useable since October 2017, but can still be deposited at most high street banks.

Around 24million of them have been returned in the last year. A Royal Mint spokesman said: ‘We expect there to be some returns for a number of years to come as people find these coins.’

The old-style round coin, pictured, was replaced by a 12-sided version to crack down on counterfeiting – the Mint estimated over 3 per cent of the old versions were fake. There were about 1.7billion round £1 coins in circulation at the start of the transition period in March 2017.

The new coin is described as the most ‘secure in the world’ with anti- counterfeiting details, including a hologram and micro-sized lettering inside both rims.