 Nid i fawr am wneud yw hwn yn fawr i'r ffordd nid, yw'n fawr hynny i gyd o ymddangos y gweithlwn. Mae'r ffordd nid yn gweithio dda fo y ffans y mae cyllidiau yn ei gydig, a hoffa'r bautiau os yw hwn yn gweithasio gwneud y ffordd, o iechyd o ffodol, o beth o bwysigio ei fawr mewn cyff assez a oedd yn diolch. Nid o bwysigio mewn anрам oedd Ymddangoseth, a hynny diwethafau a'r ffordd o anwyddi, I'm the Executive Director of Positive Money, and we are a research and campaigning non-profit. Our mission is to reform the money and banking system so that it supports serving a fairer, more democratic and more sustainable economy. We'd really like to thank Barrow Cadbury Trust for supporting the research that's work that we've been doing for just over a year. One of the reasons it's a particularly exciting report for us to be launching is because those of you that are very familiar with Positive Money's work know that generally we're working on quite long, slow, difficult work of trying to change macroeconomic thinking. This report feels much more relevant and especially to the current discussions and the current discussions that seem to be accelerating on the feature of cash, those in government, but also around the regulatory system as well. It doesn't feel at all like a kind of stuck in ivory town thinking with this report, so that's really exciting for us. We've seen how relevant it is just a week ago on the 13th of the Treasury announced that it's going to be doing an open consultation on cash and digital payments between now and June, between digital payments and the new economy, and we'll be feeding in our findings from the report to their consultation. Additionally, the Treasury Select Committee already has an inquiry underway on digital currencies. Government and Parliament are clearly picking out that things are moving fast in this space and that changes do require regulatory oversight. We've got David Clark, who's the Head of Policy and Advocacy at Positive Money, who wrote the report. He's going to lead the evening and give us an overview of the report and its findings. Then we have responses from three fantastic speakers. Catherine West is an MP for Hornsey and Woodgreen. Before being elected, she was the leader of Islington Council in February 2013. She was awarded a local authority leader of the year by the local government information unit on her work leading the Islington Fairness Commission. She was shadow foreign minister between 2015 and 2017 and now sits on the International Trade Committee. Carl Patlin is a research and good practice manager at 20 Hall. Before this, he was an independent researcher working with a number of organisations including think tanks and academic institutions, working on projects looking at financial inclusion and household over indebtedness. He's written two books on personal debt and the payday loans industry and was the author of a report with the TUC in 2014 on the impact of benefit delay, looking at the impact of universal credit on payment debt profiles. Finally, Drew Hendry MP is the MP for Inverness, the SNP, and he's their spokesperson for business, energy and industrial strategy. Before gaining the seat in Westminster, Drew was the leader of Highland Council and in 1999 he founded Tech Plan Limited, a company which delivers digital marketing services for online retailers and e-commerce merchants. Drew also sits on the business, energy and industrial strategy select committee and is the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on digital economy. So if you just want to join me in welcoming our speakers and then we'll kick off to David to use the report. At the moment, 2.7 million people rely almost exclusively on cash and millions more use cash on a regular basis. Technology and payments is developing rapidly and there's a long-term decline in cash use, but all the evidence suggests that people will continue to use cash a long time into the future. So we've set out to consider who has a preference for cash, what are the reasons for people wanting to use cash and how can we ensure that those people's interests are protected. So I want to start by telling you three things you might already know about the people that rely on cash and three things which might surprise you. People on lower incomes are more likely to rely on cash. Of the 2.7 million people who rely on cash during 2016, over half had household incomes of less than 15,000 pounds a year. Older people are more likely to rely on cash. Nearly 40% of all the people rely on cash are 65% or over. And people rely on cash are less likely to live in urban areas. But three surprising facts. There are hundreds of thousands of 18-24-year-olds who rely on cash. Most of the people who rely on cash have access to a bank account, so often we talk about cash-reliant people and unbanked people as being synonymous, but actually they're two distinct groups. And lots of people who like to use cash on a regular basis are actually have a high degree of digital capability. A lot of people who have access to electronic payments are still preferring to use their money in cash. More of the reasons why people prefer to use cash. So a lot of people find it useful for budgeting. You know how much money you have and what you're spending it on. A lot of people are distrustful of banks. A majority of adults in the UK don't trust banks to work in their customers' best interests, and so that's the reason why a lot of people like to use cash instead. A lot of people don't like the frictionless nature of electronic payments, so the fact that paying for stuff with your card or online requires fewer conscious steps than using physical cash. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute has done some really good research looking at why a lot of people with mental health conditions self-exclude from using electronic payments because of the risk of having access to electronic payments during a period of mental health crisis. Cash reliance is often talked about in terms of a problem that we have to rescue people from, but actually people have a range of really legitimate and rational reasons for wanting to use cash. There are powerful forces driving the decline of cash and powerful best interests who'd like to see the back of it. Visa, Mastercard, big banks. But its decline is not inevitable and if we leave people to their own devices there will still be a demand for cash for millions of people for a long time into the future. Cash will only disappear if no one steps in to protect it. I want to talk about one way that we should protect people's ability to use cash, and that's access to cash machines. The vast majority of people access cash via cash machines, particularly with the worrying trend of bank branch closures. So we've looked primarily at cash machines as an issue that needs attention at the moment. So if you go and carry out a transaction at a cash machine, your bank pays a fee and that's how the cost of running the cash machine is paid for. At the moment we have a reasonably even spread of cash machines because the fees that banks pay are roughly equivalent to the cost of operating the machine. Most cash machines are connected by the link network, which is a membership organisation made up of the big banks and the companies that operate the machines. But that network, the fundamental thing is that that is funded by fees from the banks and at the moment there's a lot of pressure from banks for a link to reduce its fees. And it's recently, at the start of this year, has confirmed the first incremental series of reductions of the fees that banks have to pay for ATMs. Obviously, if banks are paying less for people to use to make transactions at an ATM, that puts ATMs at risk. And there have been warnings that we're about to see a significant reduction in the number of ATMs available. Why is this happening now? You may not know that fees on a mastercard also operate their own ATM schemes. They've started offering fees below the actual cost of running the ATM, so that's an attractive option for the banks, not so good for the companies running the ATM. And if banks were to improve these alternative schemes, it would mean a lot of ATMs would be likely to close. We should be extremely suspicious about the motives of these card companies getting involved in cash provision. It would be seriously concerning if Visa, for example, would operate this essential part of our cash infrastructure. Really, the only thing that stands between us and cash access disappearing, or a lot of cash machines disappearing, is whether we have a regulator that is effective enough to step in and stop it. Link is a well-being organisation, but you can't expect the link board to be independent when the scheme is funded almost entirely by banks and it's being undermined by card companies. So, we need a regulator that's powerful enough and determined enough to protect our access to cash, and that's why in this report we've recommended that protecting cash access should be made a statutory duty of the payment systems regulator. So, as well as protecting cash, Government of the Bank of England needs to be considering how we adapt to changes in technology and payments preferences. If you think about why people choose to use cash at the moment, it's a risk-free form of payment. You don't have to rely on a bank to use it, and it's universally accessible, and generally it is accepted by retailers. Government of the Bank of England should be thinking, can we replicate these qualities of cash in a digital form? And we believe that that can be done through the issuance of a central bank digital currency, or a digital version of cash. There's a lot of excitement, obviously, at the moment around digital currencies with the demise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But actually, the technology for this exists already. The Bank of England already issues risk-free electronic money. It's just at the moment the only people who have access to that are the big banks. The introduction of a central bank digital currency, or digital cash, could in principle mean universal access to risk-free savings and payments. And for the millions of people who feel poor instead by the existing banking sector, that represents an exciting opportunity. In practice, its success depends on whether digital cash accounts would have different characteristics and support different facilities than those currently offered by existing bank accounts. So we propose that digital cash accounts would be opened up via an indirect access approach. So it wouldn't be like the Bank of England operating, or the accounts themselves. The Bank of England would hold and create the currency, but the payments and customer services would be operated separately. That could be done by tech startups, mobile phone companies, or even existing financial institutions. And we believe that this way digital cash could help to reduce the barriers to entry in the payments market and encourage innovation. But we shouldn't rely entirely on the private sector to meet people's payments preferences, because if we do that, it's likely that some people will always be left out. Fair and universal access to digital payments can only really be safeguarded through the introduction of a publicly owned provider of digital cash accounts with a specific remit to meet the needs of people who are currently excluded. So let's imagine for a moment what money and payments could look like in 2030. In one eventuality, maybe if we continue down the road we're going, cost cutting by banks and pressure on car companies will mean that cash is very difficult to access. We've got a much reduced ATM network, and the ATMs that remain a lot of them you'll have to pay for. Innovation has focused on novelty, so you might have loads of different new payments methods you can pay with your fingerprint or with your watch, but underneath it all it's still the same big banks that are controlling people's money. And the option, if you don't like that, then there'll be some private digital currencies, risky, volatile, that still leave many people excluded. On the other hand, let's imagine if civil society, policy makers and regulators came together to design a payment system that recognises everyone's individual needs. People's different preferences are catered for. Many people still choose to use cash, which is widely available, but there's also universal access to electronic payments via a digital form of cash. What money and payments looks like in 2030 depends on the decisions that we make in the next few years, and I hope that this paper can help us make the right ones. Thanks, David, so we're going to hear responses from our panel now, kicking off with Catherine. Thank you very much, and it's wonderful to be here, and a big thank you to Positive Money for putting this evening together, and I wanted to keep my comments very brief because I want to hear back from you. I'm also very proud to be on this panel with someone from Toynbee Hall, because often in my advice surgery at the Wood Green Library every second Friday, we give out the address of Toynbee Hall for people who are in really, really serious debt. Obviously, Members of Parliament often have very good staff, but very few of them can actually do that in-depth work where there are several different debts to several different companies or public bodies, and I'm just so proud to have an association with Toynbee Hall, and a big thank you to all the case workers there who do that fantastic work. There's a dwindling number of places to get really high quality advice. Lots of advisors and former legal aid charities and so on now just don't do that really in-depth, sitting down with a person for a couple of hours and really helping them to make the right decisions and get their finances sorted out. These days lots of CABs, et cetera, don't really have that resource, so they're just signposts somewhere else, and together with the Mary Ward Legal Centre, we're really lucky here in central London to have something like that, and I think what's really valuable about this report, it does show the regional differences. Particularly around the ATMs, it shows that there is 16% of the population who do not live close enough to an ATM, 16 kilometres away. The exact statistic is in the report, but we're seeing increasingly people just not having access to an ATM. Very briefly, the parts of the report which struck me as particularly scary, that 53% of bank branches have closed since 1989, which is extraordinary when you think that that has sped up in the last couple of years. There are all sorts of reasons that banks give for that, but in the end a lot of our low income population who rely so heavily on cash banking and the traditional sort of banking are on a very low income because of the banks. So there does seem to be an irony there in terms of what's happened since 2008, and the fact that it seems to be the same people who get hit time and time again by different changes to policy and different ways of doing things. The other thing which struck me was that the National Housing Federation, which is the umbrella group for social housing providers, said that 40% of their tenants were not comfortable using the internet. Now, I don't know how you all feel about logging on or having a handheld device or an iPad or something, but these days almost half of the people that you work with are not comfortable on the internet. Just think how excluded they are, and I think that just shows the extent of the challenge which comes out in the report, particularly when universal credit of course is all done online. And that's why we see so many people falling out of benefit, and it's part of the reason why we're seeing the increase in homelessness is that people just cannot cope with these ways of gaining access to benefits. They then basically fall out of benefits, end up not paying their rent, all the automatic systems click in, they get all the letters, may not be able to read the letters, end up on the streets, end up with drug addiction and mental health problems. And that is part of the reason, in that cocktail of reasons, why we've ended up with almost a tripling of rough sleeping since 2010. Just very briefly, a couple of other points which I thought were very well made in the report. The importance of cash as a budgeting tool, and we all know that those of us who have children, that if you give a child pocket money from just after primary school age, that it does actually teach a young person if they spend big online thing, then they won't have any money at the end of the week and so on. And similarly for others, and this is regardless of sort of what income group you are in, because lots of people who are in high income groups also have problems with managing money, but that cash actually can help you. So if you know that you've got 50 pounds to get to yourself to next Saturday, you work out your travel and you work out all the things that you need, whereas assuming that everybody will just be able to use other products which are not cash, I think is a very big assumption. So the other thing of course is just underlying all this, is not wanting to let the banks get away with what they want to do. And I think we all know that there's been a building of a sense of a lack of trust in institutions, be that in democracy as an MP. I know coming in 2015 as a new MP that people were questioning whether MPs could be trusted with money given how they spent their own budgets. There's been a real question mark over the church, hasn't there, as an institution, because of the child abuse standards. There's been a real question mark for the banks and the way that they really did all that casino banking and basically smashed up the toys while they were in charge of the financial system. I think that that's been a real lesson to us as consumers as to what banks are capable of. I work with a lot of people who work in financial services and I don't think it's the people necessarily who are seeing the bank branches, but the decision makers at the top of banks who are still paying themselves a large amount of money, which is way over the recommended 20 times the lowest paid person in the organisation, which is what I believe is a good rule of thumb. They are responsible for some of the big mistakes that have happened, so the liable scandal, the inter-bank loan scandal, the tax evasion scandals, which have done some of the major banks. We've had the money laundering scandals, which are still working its way through the legal system, and of course just bank closures. I'm sure, like Drew, I've fought bank closures in Wood Green in my own constituency. We ran a big campaign with HSBC and I've got HSBC into my office and banked my fist on the table and we had community groups and everything. It was a massive petition. It made not one bit of difference. I'm afraid I'm very hardline on the banks and I don't think that they should be able to just get away with closing a branch and not even providing an ATM in this place. I think we do need more regulation on this particular question of access to cash and I support the recommendations in the report. I look forward to asking lots of difficult parliamentary questions and stopping it to the Chancellor. Thank you very much. How to follow that? How to follow that call? I'm from Toynby Hall. First of all, thank you for inviting me, a representative of our organisation, to come and speak at this launch. The report is very good if you haven't read it, or if you go and read it, it's an extremely interesting paper with lots of facts, and there are lots of counter-intuitive facts as well. It also serves as a really, really good discussion point for a lot of the conversations that I know I have, a lot of people I know have on financial inclusion, on the poverty premium, and a lot of this speaks to very, very relevant and live issues to the bank branches. The Church of England has brought in cashless payments. All this feeds into this far and wide issues, far and wide. We really support the report. I support it from the moment I picked it up, actually, in the exact summarises. Cash is still relied upon by 2.7 million people, including many who are on low incomes, elderly or struggling with ill health. Some find it useful for budgeting while others are responding to a banking system that is failing to serve their interests. That's a very common-sensical view, but also it speaks to the problem of those groups of people, often the people who are left behind, the same group of people who aren't at the forefront of people's minds when they're devising and creating financial services products, for example, and so it's good to have a discussion paper that has those groups of people at the forefront. Just another point on the use of cash and the benefits of cash. Cash is a great leveler. The point that's been made already is that it's not just these groups of people that rely on cash. Rich or poor, young or old, everyone really relies on cash and I was striking for me to go over some of the stats out there on cash usage to find the three-fifths of cash payments that are five pounds or less in 2016 were made by cash. So that's everyone really. Everyone is implied or insinuated in if cash usage goes out of fashion, or people try and make sure that we have a cashless society that affects everyone. So cash is the great leveler on that in that regard. With regards to our demographic, people who come and visit Toynby Hall tend to be on low incomes, often losing battle against the poverty premium, and sometimes all the anecdotes about people relying on cash, but I just want to build some concrete examples of who those people are based on some of the research that I've done already this year. So I spoke to Frida, Frida is 25, she's a single mother. In 2015 she was unbanked, 2015 she was internet savvy, she used to have a bank account, she used to do direct debits when she was working but got into an accident where we were draft with them. He's now unemployed or into 2015 became unemployed, has a credit union account but pays for everything in cash and much prefers it. In 2016 she got a bank account but still operates mainly in cash so she will be paid into her bank account but take out all the cash in one go so that she can budget and control her own money in cash. She uses an ATM card to draw out cash in small amounts and check her balance. Only recently shops online but generally distrustful of online prefers to do everything over the counter. No longer does direct debits and doesn't want an overdraft because of previous bad experiences. When I spoke to her again in 2017 she became unbanked again because they closed her account as they did all people who had just a current account with them and she was not in debt so it wasn't penalisation on that front. She's fine using the credit union again as she may not be operated in cash. She only misses the ability to withdraw cash at the ATM. I think it was a point well made that a lot of people who are using cash have a bank account. She's obviously been unbanked and banked at different times in her life but at all of those stages she felt comfortable with cash. The idea that someone would want to take that away or the notion of that being outside of her control with cash use drops was something she didn't want to think about because she was very comfortable with using cash and she got by just fine. Another example was Aaron I spoke to, 23, has a bank account that uses cash as much as he can. I just want to put this in context. When I was speaking to him he didn't have notes. He was just telling me off the top of his head to just give you an idea of how closely he budgets for every last pound and penny that he has. So he gets 220 pounds at ESA fortnightly and 421 pounds monthly paid into his RBS account. He uses his bank card to withdraw cash at ATMs and prefers to pay for everything in cash where possible. For example, he pays his electricity, water and council tax via card and pay point. He uses his bank card as a default if he has no cash but prefers to pay in cash but uses his card if he's forgotten cash. Much prefers to deal with cash as it's simpler and his quote, I know where it's going, it's easier and I'm setting my ways. Also he trusts cash more. He draws the money out and pays a, does shop in, pays the electricity in other bills and leaves any leftover in the bank as savings to use the clothes. For example, a winter coat or household stuff as he has needed. It might sound like I'm going into too much detail but I just want to give you an impression of the people that we speak to. They're not silly, they don't get themselves into financial distress or poverty because of a lack of caring about their own situation. Often the environment that they're in and the products that are set up and created aren't generally thinking about those people or they don't have those people in mind, unfortunately. So they use financial control and cash use as their method of avoiding the poverty premium. Lastly, I'll just finish up by saying that one of the other things in the summary recommendations that we really support and I really support was this. I did a certain fintech plan to expand access to electronic payments to groups which have so far been excluded. Regulators must remove unnecessary barriers to growth. That's a discussion at the end of the paper but I wanted to add to that was the accelerator programmes and the programmes that charities and other organisations are providing to council certain small start-ups and certain fintechs and other innovators in the issues around financial health and how to avoid the poverty premium. My organisation, another organisation called the Finance Innovation recently did a financial health fellowship which was a way of bringing in new start-ups, new entrepreneurs and we did a series of classes and educational programmes around what issues come up for charities like my own, issues around the poverty premium and how we can find real solutions to avoid these things. So we support that recommendation as well and so I'm glad that this discussion is continuing on cash use because it's very important not just for the people in who we see are demographic but also everyone. Thank you. Thank you. It's always in the light to face the challenge of following interesting speakers and trying to remain interesting. I'll do what I can. My proposition would be that people, not technology, should determine what's required for the future. It's also shouldn't be the banks that determine that because they've got such a good track record underneath with sub-prime and all the other scandals. It was noticeable, if I might just mention on that, that when the banks needed people, people were there to support the banks because they had to through the taxes and now when we see that banks are returning to profit, it's the people who are being apprised and buying closures and other restrictions. And I think it is important that there is a voice of people to say whether or not they want to use cash, whether or not they want to use banks and branches and cash machines into the future. Now, I was introduced as the MP for Inverness and actually the MP for Inverness in the Unbanock in Strasby, which is the longest parliamentary name in Parliament. That aside, it will give you an indication that it's not just the city of Inverness I have but a large rural area within that. Within the rural areas we have pretty full employment. There's very low unemployment rates but low incomes across the piece in the rural areas. And we also have a high demographic in terms of older people in our communities there. And it's also an economy which is one of the largest private enterprises, the largest private sector is tourism. Now, all of those things combined mean that we rely on a lot of cash actually circulating around that local economy in order to maintain things. So people use cash in lots of different transactions. What we tend to find is that that cash circulates through those communities because people on low incomes spend their money in local shops. They don't give it all to Amazon or to faceless organisations elsewhere. They actually go down to the local shops and buy their things there. But we also find that within that circulation in the economies of those communities that very action, the interaction of cash within those communities helps to maintain the very fabric of the communities because people are moving around the villages and towns and actually creating a healthier environment in terms of that interaction with communities. Better neighbourhoods actually come out of that. So cash is really, really important to us in terms of what we need within our communities and it will do into the future. But it also gives choices to people and that's very important. It's a very clever choice within that. Cash isn't for everyone and if you consider not just those people who might want cash because they're working on low incomes or even because an older person is more comfortable with that. There's actually another group of people, quite large groups or segments of the society where you find it very, very difficult to operate an environment outside of cash. So for example if you've got really bad autism, you're very high in the autism spectrum, the idea of using digital banking is terrifying for people. And again they move towards forcing people down that route. This enfranchises a whole bunch of people who are up until now have not been considered because they are collateral. They're part of the unintended consequence of this drive towards digital. They probably heard again in the introduction on what gets digital. I've made my living out of it at a previous incarnation before I got into politics and it was in digital marketing and it's something I understand. But I also understand that we tried really hard to run with a paper in its office but everything was going to be digital. But now when you go into that office or you go into any of our MPs offices you'll see there's great big piles of paper everywhere because the medium just doesn't suit everybody all the time. It's a great in theory. Just like digital banking is great in theory of course it's easy, it's very quick and so forth and everything's only if it doesn't work for everyone. And just like other mediums, if you consider for example when radio came along it was going to kill the newspaper or when TV came along it was going to kill the radio or when the internet came along it was going to kill TV. None of those things have died off and I think it's the same proposition with cash and other methods of payment. All of them are fine in the environment. All of them are fine if people choose to use those particular mediums for paying for what they need but they're not fine for everything. I just want to pick up a couple of points that were made by Catherine and Carl as well. Really important thing. I remember learning about getting my financial education through cash. I'm old enough to remember the switch from the switch of currencies from £1 showing at pens and for the decimal currency and at school they gave us plastic money in order to understand the transfer from it. But I also learned, if I was doing a job or something like that, I could earn money, I could get something in my hand, tangible reward for it. And I learned, as Carl said, I learned the discipline of actually using cash and the budget. And that's a really important skill I think that we risk losing by taking that opportunity out of the field for people. I don't think it's the same to knock on the door saying, Bob a job and get a swipe your card as you go away from it. It's not the same experience and it never will be and it never should be. So in conclusion I would say that it is really important that we support the ability of people to decide for themselves the way they want to operate into the future. We support cash where it's available. Absolutely on board with making a statutory requirement. I think we absolutely must and we should. And we should never forget that it's not a one size fit all. It's not one big urban area where everybody's using their app. It's not one big situation where everybody's got the same access because that is not the case in life. And people in their communities should determine what they need for the future. I'm now really keen to hear for as many of you as possible, but before I take questions on the floor, if any of you have been to a positive money event before you know we like to make the most participatory as possible. So I'm going to get you to speak to the person next to you for just five minutes, so that's two and a half minutes each if you want to appoint a timer in your pair. And we'd really love questions. We've heard a lot of different things around ATMs, digital technology, digital cash, cash use fees or market cards, but also it'd be great to hear about your own experiences or preferences and how you use or not use cash or payments. So five minutes and then I'm going to cut you off whether you're mid-sentence or not. If we can see your hands, I'm going to take three questions at a time. So okay, we're going to take these two and then there's one at the back, the green jumper. Digital money relies entirely on technology. Over the last month or so we've been a week away from mass power cuts. We're going into a cold war with Russia who has a massive hacking capability. And all our technology can be hacked if they put one power station down at Cascade Park across the country and we could be weeks without electricity. Big question to kick off, thank you. I think it's common knowledge that when people use cash in payments or everything, they are careful about expenditure. The banks and the card companies know very well that the only way to get people to get in debt is to use a cashless system. So it's in the interest to make sure that society or more and more use cash less and less. And so by doing so people become more poorer and poorer. And so I think this is one of the reasons why we are pushing for a cashless society more or less. Thank you, big question. Brilliant, thank you. I'm just going to try and squeeze in two questions really, really quickly. So firstly, the total volume of cash goes up year on year, but the percentage in transactions goes down year on year. How is that? Can you explain? And then the second one is that talking about cash is a kind of homogenous thing and there's a growing campaign to get rid of high denomination notes. So I know that the UK has quite a low, compared to international comparisons of Swiss applications, of 1,000 Swiss franc notes. But it doesn't look a bit different if you highlight one particular note, say the £50 note. That's not high usage, I imagine, amongst the kind of constituents that we've been talking about. Is there maybe a drive to think about eliminating those high denomination notes? Thank you, great questions. So technology, electricity, Cold War Russia, can you? Can I tackle the connected? Yeah, do you want to pick us up? Obviously, hope to avoid any kind of war in Cold War, but I understand where you're coming from. But I think it goes further than that. You're right to talk about power cuts. I've seen this as an MP who represents a constituency in the Highlands. When I moved to my house in the Highlands in 2003, very shortly afterwards there was a severe winter that hit us, and we were without power in our community for three days. So we actually had experience of that. But it goes beyond the loss of electricity for many communities, rural communities, so the level of connectivity that's required for digital transactions is just not there anyway. Or it's not reliable enough. So it is a problem that even if you were to persuade people that you didn't need cash and you could go to that digital place, the moment the infrastructure is not there, and we know that as technology moves on, it's unlikely that rural areas will catch up or be able to catch up with the urban areas as they're developed commercially with it. Can we pick up just very quickly on the issue? I think you're spot on with your description of what happens in the chain where people are persuaded that they should be using digital all the time. Going cashless, it is a really easy leap. When you look at the app, it says, get alone, get an overdraft and everything else like that. It's a really easy leap into debt for people. When they go into that debt, as Carl said earlier, sometimes if cash is gone, where do they go? Where are the people he mentioned earlier go after that? There's no cash. A big open question. Can I just pick up on a point that you made about the car companies? Because I think that's still a relatively new product. The reason we know that is that wages have been back for 30 years and that there's more and more people who are driving very expensive cars and it's because they've got these monthly payments. I think when they go to sign off on what's like a lease, and positive money, people will know exactly what it is and the technicalities, but I feel that's something which perhaps in Parliament we should be looking at a bit more closely, because I think people do get hoodwinked into this transaction they can't see. You don't see the cash, but then suddenly you're driving a lovely car and you don't have any money for the rent. We don't have money for food on the table, and I think that's partly the way that the selling works. I think we need to, as members of Parliament, but also as people who want to promote educated consumers, is looking more carefully at how some of those car deals are signed off, because when you think about how flat our economy is, there's far too many people driving really fancy looking cars and they are like a fleet car, and that's how the car company is kind of managed, and I think that that is well overdue for a consumer review. Do you want to pick up on a few points? To pick up on this gentleman's point down here, it's not just the banks that are cajoling people into bank accounts in order to serve the indebted tune of people, but government as well. With the movement towards universal credit, people are being encouraged to get into a bank account in order to accept those payments of universal credit into an account, rather than also alternative providers like the Post Office, the Post Office card account. Government is already signalling that they won't be paying some payments into a Post Office card account, so it's about cajoling people into getting that access. We've already seen some of the problems that that will bring. So I did a day in a homeless centre speaking to people in a homeless centre in Cambridge, and a lot of people there had very recently just fallen outside of the benefit system altogether. They realised where things were going, they realised that they wouldn't be able to maintain the sorts of life that they had gotten used to, a cash-overly or cash-reliant life. So that means that they've just fallen outside of a system that they see working against them, and that's going to happen more and more, unfortunately. Thanks. Can you pick up on the last couple of questions around high demolition notes? Yeah. So why is the volume of cash and circulation going up with the number of transactions? Lots of currency gets produced, used once, and then sits in someone's house, which policy makers often see as a problem, but actually it's important to remember that cash is not just a payments method, it's also a store of value, it's a risk-free way of looking after your money, and for a lot of people that's attractive because they need to do it, so I think that's, although a lot of cash might not be being used on a regular basis for payments, it's still being used as a store of value, which is important for people. I feel a bit agnostic about high demolition notes, and they're not being, again, they're using a lot of the store of value, but I guess it's important for people, and I think if you look at some of the reasons that we focus on this paper about why people are relying on cash, like it's for people managing low incomes, or it's for people who have other issues with money payments, and I think whether or not having a 50-pounder is really important for those people is a question that I've yet to have an answer to. Great, thank you. So we'll take three more questions. Can I just add to that, just very, very quickly? I spoke to someone not so long ago who was paid almost exclusively 50-pounder notes on the grounds that his employer told him it was easier for him to transport fewer notes that are higher volumes of money to pay to distribute to all of his employees, so it could be as simple as that to be honest. There's another issue. The Modi government in India deep monitor rights and I don't remember what the phrase was, but high value notes, because high value notes were used in money transactions, and maybe that's going on, if we're not aware of it, because money can't be traced, whereas really if you have a bank account, you can be traced when you buy anything. So I think we're going to take three questions. So we've got time for everyone to discuss things afterwards. So we're going to take one, two, and then one from the back. With the green jump home scarf, you might need to pass it along. I understand what the bloody proposal for Bank of England digital cash and I want to just explain something a bit more about how it works. Great, thank you. In front, just in front of you. The real question is basically my question because we're in dialogue, but I wasn't able to explain. But I took the store of value point, which you've just made, but are there other aspects? Great, thank you. And I think there was one at the back. Yeah, with the glasses. Where are you being? Funding, a similar theme to the two questions you just had. I was wondering when you're talking about digital cash, whether you're talking about digital currency, which one of my definitions is controlled by a centralized organisation like a bank or a crypto currency, which then becomes a distributed, uncontrolled currency and therefore much more akin to cash. Yeah, good point. And you would take another word. Was there a question just in front there? No, okay. So the back with the beard. Thank you. One thing that really concerns me is about individual civil liberty and moving towards a cashless society. When you look further on down the road, you can imagine me introducing more and more biohacking. So we lose all anonymity on when we make payments. So if I'm just going to a coffee shop having a coffee, if I can't use cash, then that means I'm being monitored. There's a record of everything there. I have no choice to be anonymous. And that's one thing that does concern me. Great. So biohacking is happening already. People are even volunteering to be biohacked. You have a kickoff answering those points from digital cash, anonymity, can I ever say that word? Anonymity of digital cash and civil liberties and crypto. So digital cash is a way of storing your money and making payments electronically. I think you already have the ability to do that with the money in your bank account. The difference with digital cash is one of the important differences is who technically controls and creates that money. So the money in your bank account, you might be, or some of you won't be surprised to hear this, but others might, is technically the proxy of your bank. It exists as an IOU from the bank that the bank will deliver on when you want to pay for something or withdraw cash. A central bank digital currency or digital cash will be created by the Bank of England. It will be completely risk-free. You wouldn't have to rely on a bank account to use it. It will be accessible to use any time. And I think not having to rely on big banks is kind of, obviously an attractive profit on how they manage the money and make payments. So the difference between digital cash and cryptocurrencies, what I'll propose over digital cash is it's like things like Bitcoin as I say in that you don't need to have a bank account to use it. It is unlike Bitcoin in that it does have a central controlling authority. You could potentially use some of the technology behind Bitcoin. You could even anonymise the payments that you wanted to. There are certain advantages to the central bank being able to have no view of what everybody's transactions are to deal with criminality and activation. So I think the fact that a lot of people are interested in things like Bitcoin shows that there is an appetite for people to want to paper stuff electronically, manage their money electronically without having to rely on a bank. That is a legitimate desire that people have and it should be recognised by the government and delivered through digital cash. Typical politician I'll mash things together and give you the answer I want to give you as opposed to the one you asked. I think the future of cryptocurrencies is a future of money. I'm quite excited by the possibilities of the blockchain and I think it is something that's really really interesting should people decide that's what they want to do. It is a choice. I think where you really the issue of the moment is about this invasion into your own activities through profiling and we've seen that even one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Facebook, this week has actually been harvested by illegally by Cambridge Analytica and at the moment I don't believe there is a kind of protection available to make sure that doesn't happen as a piece. So there's a lot of work to be done to make sure that digital future is a really secure future and I don't think we're there yet although I do believe there are exciting opportunities, should people decide to actively buy in and participate one final word on that all data I believe should be in the ownership of the people who generate IEU and you should have the ownership of your own data. Do you need any one then? You don't have to? No, I'm heptic. There is a great deal of understandable concern with regards to data breaches and I think that that often, very often is the reason for why people want to continue to be solely cash or cash reliant. So I don't think you have to be where it is in Royal Hatel with conspiracy theorists to be at least concerned about the notion of big organisations losing data or being in breach of their data privacy commitments and I think that that has a huge impact on people's attitudes towards those big financial firms as well. I might leave Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to others so I don't think, as far as I know it doesn't have a policy to be proud of. I'll just take the chair's liberty of just building a little bit on the questions around positive monies on digital cash. One of the exciting things we don't really go into the report but we've been doing other work on is how if you did have a central bank issue digital currency then you could in theory then you could separate out the payment system from the rest of the banking system and remove things like deposit insurance and subsidies to banks and kind of end tubing to fail by having this risk free money that's stored for the Bank of England. We won't go too much into it now so can we take another round of questions? It would be great to see any women put their hands out. I know we're a male dominated audience but just kind of encouraging so we'll take two on this side here and here. What my appetite with the idea of separating out one function of money from separating it completely from credit. That sounds like a fantastic idea. I'm coming next. I'm a supporter of positive monies since the day I heard Ben Dyson speaking in his inaugural speech there are two specific points which have kept me supportive of the organisation. One is that redesigning of the balance sheet for the Bank of England was proposed in one of the indices of your book modernising money. The other was that, that's gone now because I'm doing too much. However, what I would like to say is this I don't know about any attempt to remove money which again your books publish as only 3% of what is called money for me anything other than what is called money which is real money you could hold in your hands stuffed down your sofas or under your bed. If that is taken away that would be the end of any control any of us have which already is almost near. So I'm in support of the idea of your campaign to keep money and report other. Anyone who hasn't read this book which I've only just seen now it is by Stephen Whitford Goodson and it is called a History of Central Banking. If you haven't anyone who has read it really this is going to be an image. What I really want to finish by saying is you put a very good case in my view for keeping money and I support that. However it is being used as we are sitting here in our Central Banking surroundings to increase the homelessness of the country by the big difference of the filthy criminal Tory government under the filthy editor of the even standard now who has come on they must hear this. Love love please do I want love to but love for easy. This system of centralized dictatorship from Westminster now supported and guarded by an armed police force is not totally unsatisfactory and it's not a democracy. Thanks to the old point of colour. Well we must what we must have and I asked the panel to comment how we can do this is to protect the people who are being plunged into debt by the servants of these criminals at the highest level and are being thrown onto the streets. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm refusing to pay anything they're asking of me or demanding of me. They're plunging into debt. They will not succeed and we need your campaign to join our support and stop this outrageous criminality emanating from your system of centralized dictatorship. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Start acting. The crypto currencies are very important to people to be able to pay and so forth like that. But there's another aspect and that is our services and that's what people need are provided by our financial services sector and I think that you too appreciate the importance it is for example to support crypto currencies such that we continue London as a financial centre in the finance area in the crypto area because that is where our services and that come but we depend on these two aspects of crypto currencies one using it and the other is getting revenue from its use around the world or the dollar. Now if we came up with something like Bitcoin and if we do that right and correct the benefit to people in this arena everywhere in this country from getting that right and making money from it our services are better we are better regardless of whether we are using it or not that is a very important point and we should get that right and be world leader in it still as we are now in financial services. Okay interesting question to finish on so I'll just take comments from the panel and let's I think let's just go for it. Where to start wow the passion amazing in terms of what we are doing to avoid the debt society you know my organisation provides debt advice and we negotiate on behalf of people who choose to have our services and choose to have us as negotiating on their behalf with their creditors to ensure they are not penalised or paying over the odds for the money that they borrow or the services that they acquire from mainstream financial services and alternative financial services so hopefully we are doing a good job in that lots of people think so believe me that we are doing a good job anyway yeah so that's an answer to that one. I wanted to pick up Colin's point on debt and I don't know how many of you know that Michael Sheen is doing a big push on this but I thought to pick up your anger, I'm very pleased that people from every sector now are saying the same thing really because he's a very wealthy actor who doesn't make good and he's basically from a low income part of Wales and he's decided to get together to develop a sort of anti-debt coalition and he points out that 3 million UK households are paying more than 25% of their income to creditors representing 10 million people or more than 15% of the population so I think Colin's point is that this isn't just a small number of people that I might see in my surgery or that Tony Behal might help you know every Thursday in a drafty hall we're now getting towards a sizeable proportion of the population and there's a few things which the government could do quickly to make an incremental difference which over you know a decay would make a big difference and they are really basic things which Drew and I vote together on things like stopping the benefit freeze things like not introducing that the third child in a household doesn't basically get the benefit because only you're only allowed to benefit for two children, not your third or fourth children if you've got a big family which actually is also quite discriminatory in terms of different parts of the country and ethnic groups and so on and also just having sort of proper consumer protection when people are taking out those car loans when people are trying to get their head around financial inclusion issues because we know from the work of positive mum and other groups that actually the average age for a lot of people is about 11 in terms of breeding age and understanding basic numeracy and therefore we have a real duty as MPs, as civil society to really highlight these issues that have been campaigned for the government changes like on those benefit changes and with your campaigning effort and with us hopefully winning a few votes in the House of Commons and we've got the numbers on certain of these sorts of issues we can hopefully change to have the positive vision which the likes of Australia have proposed today. Thank you. Yeah and a couple of things, first of all just to pick up on your point that you missed out on the response here Largely, not completely it doesn't work 100% of the time but actually we already have that separation of money and credit to the cash so you can actually separate cash from credit by existing Well exactly. And it's a little of it and that's why it's important. Absolutely and I'm going to come on to that as well. I think it is good to your passion and you've probably picked up from my opening remarks about genuinely believe the choices should be made by people and not by banks or by technology but I fancy or you fancy coming up in the future is not the thing that we should impose on others and other people shouldn't do that too. Catherine's covered really well I won't go into detail but as one of the first constituencies to have universal credit rolled out in 2013 I've spent five years dealing with increasing levels of poverty as people are driven to use food banks working people are driven to use food banks through the system that we've inherited so I'm certainly not somebody who's not going to face those kinds of challenges. I'm quite out of this I'm one of only 39 MPs who's in the Westminster system who's actually actively trying to do myself out of the job. Thank you but I think and finally I think the point you made is absolutely correct and as I alluded to earlier I think there's some really exciting opportunities with cryptocurrencies with the blockchain and so forth and we should at the forefront have taken forward these technologies the two things are not mutually exclusive as I mentioned earlier these are just different mediums and it's a matter of choice about where people actually choose to do so why wouldn't you spearhead something like that and actually it's incumbent upon governments to actually say we are going to make a positive choice to try to make sure that we are leading and but that kind of vision too often is either not there or it's caused by vested interest or indeed laziness which is unfortunately a part of politics there but all these points are good and I can only give you my personal contribution to say that I believe these are battles worth fighting that we've raised. I think it's important to remember what people want from money is actually quite simple they just want a way to save to store a value a means to make payments and I think we shouldn't be trying to compete with Bitcoin we just want a simple way for people to manage their money and at the moment if you want to make payments electronically you have to rely on or almost everybody has to rely on a handful of big banks and they're doing a bad job of serving people's needs they're doing a bad job of supporting the wider economy and so I think digital cash while protecting cash digital cash is a way of opening up lots more innovation that actually meets people's payments preferences we have a public payment provider that with a specific duty to provide payment services for people who are currently excluded and I think we've got to be like the cash of society is a long way off in fact it may never happen but we've got to start planning now to ensure that everybody's needs are met for the payments landscape for 30 years time Thank you very much and just to say that positive money will be taking this paper forward to hopefully engage with the recently announced consultation that Treasury is having on cash and digital payments and the Treasury Select Committee on Cryptocurrencies and obviously we come from a place of making sure that the changes that happen are rooted in making the system more fair, more democratic and more sustainable because currently as we've heard tonight it really is not and I think we're all agreed on the panel that that's the direction we need to go in and unfortunately that isn't the voice that's heard most of the time when it comes to the hype around the exciting future of money and payments but I just want to thank all of you for coming I feel like it's been a really great evening hopefully you can join us for a drink next door now and also thank very much our panellist because I feel like this isn't a conversation this side of the story isn't heard enough and hopefully you will all tell your friends about this paper and share it and we can ensure the protection of cash over the coming years so thank you all for coming and thanks our panellist