Simon Hoare

I admire my right hon. Friend’s perseverance in ever trying to change the signatory on a charity bank account. People have died of boredom and exasperation trying to do it. A 60-year-old has to turn up with their great grandparents, their first cat and everything else to prove who they are. The fact that the bank has known them as a private customer for years seems to pass it by. I hope I have made my points to the Minister, but let me rehearse them very briefly in bullet point form. One concerns the rubric to defend a bank closure. The assessment of access to cash needs a rural dimension, and there needs to be a much more granular understanding of the hub-and-spoke geography of a rural economy, which is very different from an urban one. We need to move away pretty quickly from merely assessing as satisfactory access to cash as defined by access to an ATM. We need to turbocharge the delivery of hubs and bring pressure to bear on the banks, and there are a variety to do that. It can be carrot and stick, through tax and other policies, to try to nudge them to move at a faster pace. I hope, however, that the Government will take the lead on social inclusion for our rural areas, reflecting the fact that they have far more small, independent shops and businesses, and that the population is disproportionately older and/or retired and dealing with disabilities, infirmities, frailties and so on. Those things should be taken into account, and I remain to be convinced that they are. I think an opportunity exists to amend the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 to give the FCA greater powers to look at wider banking services, not just cash. Our rural communities struggle. Our economies are fragile, and wages are usually lower than in urban counterparts. Another bank closure is not just another bank closure in a rural market town.