Andrew George

I strongly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. I will come to questions to the Minister in a moment; I believe that the Government need to look at the robustness and sustainability of those services. What has been put in the place of banks is rather flimsy in the longer term, and that represents a risk to the future of financial services, which are essential, particularly for the most vulnerable and digitally excluded in our society. It is worth reflecting that Members of Parliament using digital technologies perhaps do not entirely comprehend how difficult that is for some people. I am not one of the most IT-savvy people on the planet by any means, so I sympathise with those people to a certain extent. Even when someone gets on top of the electronic capacity required to use electronic services, the services often still contain degrees of linguistic ambiguity that leave even the most intelligent and educated among us rather confused. Unless someone can speak to a human being, that ambiguity remains and the inaccessibility of those services continues as well. It is not just the electronics, but the fact that someone cannot ask anyone who has designed the system what on earth they mean by the options available. I am surprised that the review of access to financial services has been reduced to an assessment of merely cash. That is what the regulations seem to say. My hon. and gallant Friend suggested that the Government need to look at this again, and I hope they will. The framework designed to protect communities from losing central banking services is far too narrowly focused. Current legislation and regulatory oversight look almost exclusively at access to cash, but needs to look at access to banking, banking advice, account advice and other services. Even Link’s formal assessments openly state that it does not consider access to more complex banking needs. It allows banks to close branches even when communities remain deeply dependent on face-to-face support, as we found in the case of Penzance, which I mentioned earlier. I ask the Minister to extend the regulatory framework, including the 2023 Act, which my hon. and gallant Friend has referred to already, so that it protects access to banking and not just cash; so that it strengthens and widens the FCA’s role to ensure that local impact, equality analysis and access to banking services more widely are mandatory considerations before closures are permitted to go ahead; so that it requires realistic travel assessments for rural and island communities; so that it improves standards and the roll-out of service standards for banking hubs; and so that it considers proportionate service obligations on banks, not least because these banks are, after all, too big to fail. In 2008, Lloyds was bailed out to the tune of more than £20 billion of taxpayers’ money. The bank says in its branding that it is “By Your Side”—but apparently only until it finds that to be unsuitable: an empty branding slogan, one is bound to observe. I hope the Minister looks at this issue. It is a matter not of consumer choice, but consumer displacement. Around 14% of adults in financially vulnerable communities in the UK—that is 2.8 million people—live in rural areas, and the rural nature and travel involved need to be considered, too.