Promised legal protection for cash is a further nail in its coffin

Published on 23 May based on an article first published on News Uncut on 21 May 2022

The Queen’s Speech, delivered on 10 May 2022, promises legal protection for access to physical cash.[1] The protection is to be afforded in a new Financial Services and Markets Bill (the ‘Bill’).[2] One might be forgiven for believing that this will ensure economically viable and convenient services to withdraw and deposit cash, for both consumer and business users. However, the Lobby Pack issued under the Prime Minister’s name pp. 55-6 blandly states the related objective as ‘Ensuring that people across the UK continue to be able to access their own cash with ease’.

This phrase contains the seeds of the continuing destruction of physical cash:

It accepts the current, degraded level of service as the benchmark, presupposing that ‘people’ can withdraw their own cash with ease now, when they cannot
It ignores the depositing side of the equation
There is no mention of the UK’s 5.6 million private businesses as cash users[3]
There is therefore no mention of businesses’ need to deposit cash if they are to accept it
There is no obligation on businesses to accept cash
There is no acknowledgement of a key advantage for businesses of accepting cash – the business receives the full face value of the sale, and not the sale value less the very substantial deductions-from-face-value imposed when payment cards are used. If the business can give out a portion of that cash received as change, or pay suppliers with it, they experience no bank fees and no deductions – and that cannot be permitted!

These deductions, occurring on all payments using either PayPal or a card carrying one of the recognized brands (Visa, Mastercard, and to a lesser extent Amex) are a major source of income for banks and they feed an extensive ecosystem of other market actors. The upswing in online shopping and the reduction in the usage of cash and cheques (brought about as much by banks’ policies as by consumers’ and businesses’ preferences) have dramatically increased this involuntary give-up by businesses of their sales revenues: a contemporary equivalent of coin-clipping.[4]

Ludicrously a payment using new, digital technology is more expensive: the expense falls onto businesses in the first instance as deductions, which are passed on in the form of higher prices to other businesses and to consumers. Digital payments are inflationary.

The upshot is that the scope of the protection offered by the Bill will at best be the current arrangements after hundreds of bank branches and Automated Teller Machines have been closed, after banks have made it extremely difficult for people and businesses to deposit cash, and after the Visa and Mastercard ecosystems have established a lock over UK payments to their own commercial benefit.

Unfortunately organizations who purport to represent the interests of users have joined in the applause. Which? has lauded the Bill as a result of its own campaigning.[5] It has also, in referring to ‘vulnerable groups’, fallen into a trap laid by the enemies of cash, meaning the proponents of digital payments, including the Payment Systems Regulator or ‘PSR’.

The trap is to accept any qualification to the principle of universal access.

The PSR’s objective is stated in their ‘Access to Cash’ workstream: ‘to support access to cash for UK consumers who need it’.[6] This formulation repeats all the exclusions of the Lobby Pack wording and goes a stage further in imposing a qualification of ‘need’.

The universe of consumers defined as ‘needing access to cash’ can be much lower than the 70 million inhabitants of the UK, can bypass the universe who might ‘want access to cash’, and can ignore those whose view might be that cash is a normal payment method, it should be their choice whether to use it or not and when, and not up to HMTreasury, the Bank of England, groups of payment technocrats or whoever.

Introducing a test of ‘need’ enables the digital payment technocrats to make a narrow initial definition of the number of people affected, and to further whittle the number away via the presentation of their own substitute products.

Substitutes are presented in last week’s report of the PSR’s ‘Digital Payments Initiative’.[7] This initiative ‘was commissioned in response to last year’s Access to Cash Working Group’s recommendation for further work to enable digital payments’. It is meekly accepted that a group charged with protecting access to cash should instead promote digital payments. The substitute products naturally include offerings in which the major card brands are market actors. The main PSR Panel and its sub-committee responsible for the report enjoy heavy representation from the payment cards ecosystem.

Another substitute is the government’s Central Bank Digital Currency, also known as Britcoin. The Bank of England panels examining Britcoin contain several of the same individuals and even more of the same organizations as sit on the PSR Panel and its sub-committee, as well as numerous other representatives from the payment cards ecosystem.

Britcoin would be a form of ‘stablecoin’: a cryptocurrency whose value is tied to a reference asset, in this case the UK pound sterling.

The Lobby Pack promises measures in the Bill for ‘the safe adoption of cryptocurrencies’, meaning the creation of the legal basis for Britcoin.

The background is Rishi Sunak’s determination that the UK become a global cryptoasset hub.[8] He simultaneously called for a Non-Fungible Token (‘NFT’) to be minted.[9] Since then Bitcoin has dropped 34% from US$47,000 to USD31,000.[10] Investors in the Terra Luna coin have lost 99% of their money.[11] Stablecoins like Tether[12] and Terra USD (the stablecoin sister of Terra Luna)[13] have lost their parity with their reference asset, and NFT volumes have crashed.[14]

Undeterred the UK payment digitization show rolls onwards, steered by a technocratic ‘concert party’ consisting of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, HMTreasury, the Bank of England, the PSR, the card-issuing banks, their trade bodies, the members of the wider cards ecosystem, Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe and so on.

The attack on physical cash is waged through optically independent and unconnected processes, each of which is predetermined to knock another nail in cash’s coffin, with the panels of pallbearers carefully selected from ‘concert party’ ranks. The Britcoin project is one such process. The PSR’s Digital Payment Initiative is another. The chocolate-fireguard of protection in the new Financial Services and Markets Bill is a third.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/queens-speech-2022 accessed on 15 May 2022

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-law-to-protect-access-to-cash-announced-in-queens-speech accessed on 15 May 2022

[3] ‘Business Statistics’: House of Commons Library Research Briefing Number CBP 06152 dated 21 December 2021 p. 4

[4] https://historyhouse.co.uk/articles/coin_clipping.html accessed on 15 May 2022

[5] https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/access-to-cash-will-be-protected-in-new-law-a1bFg6N5vzeg accessed on 15 May 2022

[6] https://www.psr.org.uk/our-work/access-to-cash/ accessed on 16 May 2022

[7] https://www.psr.org.uk/publications/general/psr-panel-s-digital-payments-initiative-report/ accessed on 14 May 2022

[8] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/04/04/uk-aims-to-become-global-crypto-hub-says-exchequer/ accessed on 6 April 2022

[9] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sunak-asks-royal-mint-to-create-nft accessed on 6 April 2022

[10] https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin/ accessed on 16 May 2022

[11] https://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/terra-luna-cryptocurrency-collapses-98-investors-lose-life-savings-122051200809_1.html accessed on 16 May 2022

[12] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/12/tether-usdt-stablecoin-drops-below-1-peg.html accessed on 15 May 2022