 Let's speak to David Clark from Positive Money UK, who joins us now. Hello, David. Hi. I'm guessing your answer is going to be no, but do you welcome a cashless society? No, we don't. The thing to understand about a so-called cashless society is that it means that we're become completely reliant on banks and card companies to manage our money and make payments. And that creates all kinds of problems. There are certain people who are excluded because they don't have access to a bank account. It means that we're likely to face higher charges, at higher prices at the tail, because card companies will be free to push up prices once the only real competition has disappeared. And it makes the whole economy more less resilient because we're all at risk when those banks experience the financial or technological failures we're seeing more and more. How does that work? Sorry, I wonder if you could unpack that a bit for me. Why will it cost us more at the tail because of no competition? I don't understand them. Oh, so really cash is the only real competition to visa and mastercard in terms of the way that we pay for the things we need. And so visa and mastercard are really keen to get rid of cash because then visa already has a 97% share of the cards issued in the UK, for example cash is the only remaining real competition to those card companies. Once cash disappears, there'll be nothing stopping them hiking the charges. Oh, I see. And they charge, just to put all the pieces together, they charge the shop and the shop will pass the cost onto the end user, I guess. Is that what you're saying? Exactly, yes. Isn't it more convenient though and therefore more efficient to use electronic payments? So some people may be, but the key thing is that we should have a choice. The problem with what's happening is it's being driven by the interests of banks and card companies. Banks have pushed for a reduction in the amount that they pay towards the cash machine network and that's really the reason why we're seeing cash machines or free cash machines closing at such a rapid rate. So it's really important that if we want to protect our ability to use cash and I suspect a lot of your listeners, like most people, will use cash on a regular basis, then we need the government to step in to put a stop to these free cash machine closures and ensure that we can continue to have choice about the way that we use our money. Isn't the future though, and people have been able to pay now with things like PayPal on their mobile phones, isn't the future that we're just going to blip devices or blip an electronic card or implant across a scanner and pay so easily that it actually becomes physically simpler than carrying cash? People are always predicting that we're moving to a society where everybody is just using electronic payments all the time, but that's really not the reality of most people's experiences and most people's preferences. The demand for cash is actually rising. We poll people and found that 77% of people say that access to a free cash machine is essential to their lives. The problem is it's a convenient story for certain private interests like the big banks to say everyone is just keen to stop using cash as quickly as possible, but that's actually not the experience of most people. What's an easy way, David, that we could fund more free cash machines? How could it be that we can get more of them? At the moment, the cash network is primarily funded by fees paid by the big banks. You can remember like 10 years ago we bailed out those banks when they got into difficulty and we continue to give them billions of pounds of subsidies every year. We should say to the banks, it's part of the deal. If they're going to carry on getting this cushy deal from the taxpayer, then they need to provide the money for these basic banking services like free access to cash which actually really doesn't... It's about a billion pounds a year to operate the whole network which is a small fraction of the profits the banks are making every year. So it's served us very well to have a free cash machine network that is paid for by the banks. That should continue, but in order for that to happen we need the government to step in. High Street banking's not that profitable though, is it? I mean it's free in this country whereas in many countries you have to pay to bank. The cash machines have been free and they've funded those through fees and their only way of making money is through charges which they've been hounded on now. I know I'm probably a voice in the wilderness if I sound like I'm feeling sorry for the banks but they do have to be in the black, don't they? They do have to make ends meet themselves. As I say, banks are still, they're very profitable businesses. They've got this huge privileges granted to them by the government, by the taxpayer. They essentially receive tens of billions of pounds in implicit subsidies every year. We should say as part of the deal they should continue to provide these basic services to people. Keep branches open in communities which rely on them, provide people with free access to cash. Great speech here. I really appreciate you coming on the show today. That's David Clark, who's head of policy at Positive Money UK.