Sir Alec Shelbrooke

I am most grateful to the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) for bringing this debate on banking before the House. I think bank closures affect every single constituency and every single person in the country, as we will hear throughout this debate. The final two banks in the town of Wetherby closed literally last month, but we were lucky, in the sense that we knew those closures were coming. I was working with the banks to get a banking hub in for a couple of years, and it has been in place in the town hall. This has given a huge advantage to the town of Wetherby, because the banks that had closed in the past are now represented again in that banking hub. Now that those last two branches have closed, the hub is going to take up residence in one of those ex-banks. That goes to show that if we can get a banking hub, we have the ability to bring things back to the community. The banks that have closed will have a representative in there on different days of the week, and as the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington pointed out, it is vital that people are able to have that face-to-face interaction. However, in other towns in my constituency—such as Boroughbridge and Tadcaster, which have a huge number of businesses—there is no banking, and there is no banking hub. The residents of those towns have been told that they are close enough to go to other areas, but as has been pointed out, that is not always the easiest thing to do. Then we come to Easingwold, at the further end of my constituency. Nationwide, with its policy of not shutting banks, still has its branch open, so Easingwold does not qualify for a banking hub. People are told that they have to go to Thirsk, a major town that is not easy to get to. As the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington outlined, there is a problem with the excuse that not enough people are using branches and therefore the banks shut them down. When branches have been shut down in the past and I ask the banks, “Can you please reconsider this?”, they say, “Well, we only had a few people come in last week—we cannot keep it open,” but they never actually do anything to encourage people to go to those branches. They never give an indication that the branch may be shut, and then they just shut it. Of course, people then miss the service, and the banks say, “There is one close by in another area.” As has been described, people are being charged to withdraw their money from a cash machine. As the hon. Gentleman said about free cash, it is their money to start with, but when banks tell people that they have to get a bus to go to the bank, they are also charging people to get their money out. Everything we are discussing passes on the cost from the banks to the consumer, just to get their money out. I am lucky that I have a banking hub in my constituency. Other towns are going to need them—they do bring advantages—but the way that the whole high street industry of banking is operating is causing huge disadvantages to people. Ultimately, it is constantly charging them to get their own money out.