David Mundell

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I know that you like good news, so I will start with some. Last week I met Stuart Miller, the chief executive of the Cumberland building society. He confirmed that the building society will keep all its branches open indefinitely —including those in Dumfries, Lockerbie, Langholm, Annan and Gretna—and that it is already seeing an uptick in customers coming from banks that have closed. My constituency—which, as you will know, Mr Wishart, is larger than any consistency in England—has seen the wholesale closure of all Lloyds and Bank of Scotland branches. We have only one Royal Bank of Scotland NatWest branch left. The branch in Biggar is about to close, and there is no real arrangement in place for what will replace it. There is very poor mobile reception, as I experienced yesterday, and there is no commitment to a free-to-access cash machine. The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) made an important point, which I have also raised with the Minister’s predecessor: Link abides by the rules—it is a rules-based organisation. In Moffat in my constituency, there are technically two other cash machines—one is in a shop and never has any money in it, and the other is in another location that is not open 24/7—so we are unable to get a free-to-access cash machine in the centre of what is a very busy town. That issue needs to be looked at. As the Minister and others may know, Henry Duncan founded the world’s first savings bank in my constituency in 1810. It seems rather ironic that it was easier to access banking 200-odd years ago than it is now.