Rural cash shortfall that leaves a sour taste
AYEAR ago I found myself in the Lanarkshire town of Douglas, shadowing a local politician around as he glad-handed constituents and judged a school Christmas card competition (spoiler alert: he used to be the Scottish Secretary, and my goodness, doesn’t the politics of 2018 seem like a million years ago?).
Douglas is a pretty place, all winding streets and stone cottages, and during our visit we were taken to see its latest small business, a bakery.
Run by a man who had grown up in the area and moved down south, only to return home to open his dream business, it had been trading just a few weeks but was already making a mark thanks to a mouth-watering selection of sweet and savoury bakes and a to-die-for sausage roll.
Chatting to one of the staff behind the counter, I learned she had been particularly grateful for the job. A few months earlier she had been made redundant after her previous employer, Royal Bank of Scotland, had shut down the local branch.
SO there was no bank in the town, then? There was not. Instead, residents had to travel miles to a filling station to get cash, and woe betide you if the ATM was having technical problems.
Even worse news awaited those who wanted to do any actual banking. The mobile banking opening times were now as follows: Monday: 2.40pm to 3.10pm. Tuesday to Sunday: closed.
The irony was not lost on me. If ever there was a business that thrives on cash, not cards, it is surely a bakery.
Nip out for a hot cross bun? Only if you’ve planned ahead. A roll for lunch? Need to pop to the filling station first. It doesn’t matter whether a place takes card payments or not, most of us like to shell out for our smaller transactions in cash (as do small businesses), and we should be able to do so without getting the car out.
So I was disheartened, but not surprised, to learn that this situation is fast becoming endemic in rural communities. So much so in fact, there’s even a name for them. They call them ‘cash deserts’, vast swathes of the country where you can’t get your hands on cold hard cash for love nor, well, money. A total of 396 branches have closed across the UK since January 2015, while 516 free ATMS have been lost in the year to July 2019 alone.
According to the Federation of Small Businesses, the problem is worse in Scotland than anywhere else.
‘When a local ATM goes, surrounding firms report a drop in footfall,’ says Andrew McRae, Scotland policy chairman for the FSB. ‘We’re losing local financial infrastructure fast.’
This is hugely worrying – because aren’t small businesses the lifeblood of our rural communities? Strip out the banks and the ATMs, and you risk taking away the very places that keep our countryside in business.
Fortunately, the Post Office Bake House in Douglas (yes, in yet another irony, the bakery is sited on the spot of a now closed post office) is still thriving and was recently nominated for a Scottish Rural Award. I can, with some authority, highly recommend the treacle scones. But I can’t help but think that it’s doing well despite not because of the recent bank closure.
How many other small businesses in Scotland will be able to buck this dangerous trend?