Barclays to bring in a strict annual cap on customer’s cash deposits

Barclays has been accused of trying to “kill cash” with plans to strictly limit how much customers can deposit.

From July, an annual limit of £20,000 will apply to the amount of cash that can be paid into Barclays personal accounts, including any associated children’s accounts. The limit will then be reset in January of each following year. Any cash paid in at branch counters and at self- deposit machines will count towards the total.

Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, was among those to condemn the change, saying: “The banks want to kill cash. Their behaviour is a disgrace.”

The high street bank follows the lead set by NatWest, which caps deposits to £ 3,000 a day, or £ 24,000 in any 12- month period, after changing its rules last September.

The bank was last year accused of moving customers towards a “cashless society” when it made the changes amid a “debanking” scandal that started when the private bank Coutts closed Mr Farage’s account over his “xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views”.

While the change is ostensibly to protect against financial crime and money laundering, critics said that it was another way for banks to stop customers using branches. Martin Quinn, of the Payment Choice Alliance, said: “It might sound like a lot, but imagine if you sold a car, were paid in cash, with nothing illegal taking place. According to the bank, you must be money laundering.

“The real reason I fear is that Barclays wants to continue to erode the branch network and force us all online.”

Community banking campaigner Derek French described it as “another limitation to suit the banks’ admin rather than customer needs”.

Cash use has been in sharp decline since before the pandemic, which accelerated the switch to cards by exacerbating hygiene concerns.

Cash made up 10pc of point of sale transactions last year, the 2024 Global Payments Report by Worldpay found. But it is projected that this will drop to just 6pc by 2027.

Everyone living in Britain should have access to a cash machine within three miles of their home, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said last summer.

But as of the end of last year, there were less than 48,000 ATMs across the country, down from a high of more than 70,000 in 2016.

A Barclays spokesman said: “We take financial crime and our responsibility to prevent money laundering seriously. We have set the limit at an amount that will allow us to better identify suspicious activity, while still ensuring our customers have access to cash.”

A NatWest spokesman said: “We have a duty of care to protect customers, communities and society from the effects of fraud and financial crime and we’ve introduced some changes to our terms and conditions to help us to do that more effectively.”

The Post Office also applies an annual limit of £10,000 for personal customers, and £240,000 for those with business accounts.

Madeleine Ross