In this digital age, should we worry about bank branch closures? Yes we should

Almost a decade after the financial crisis loomed, our high streets and town centres are full of life again: who ever thought consumers could sustain so many cafés, bakeries and nail bars? But the revival is being undermined by yet another wave of bank branch closures, leaving small businesses adrift and personal customers at the mercy of call centres and insecure, ill-designed online platforms. More than a thousand branches have closed over the past two years, and another 400 or so are scheduled to go soon. HSBC is showing the way with a savage cull of its network.

Oh well, you might say, banking really ought to be a digital business by now, and if high streets are so vigorous, those redundant premises will swiftly be filled by hipster artisans doing all manner of delightful things. After all, RBS tells us that the number of visits to bank counters has fallen dramatically since 2010, while phone-based transactions have quadrupled.

But cash and cheques are still part of daily life and we need places to put them, as well as people to ask about loans and savings. And pity the shopkeeper who is also a National Lottery franchisee in a small town with no banks and a post-office counter at the back of a mini-supermarket; his only means of banking his cash takings is to drive, several times a week, to a bigger town; and that journey may be about to get longer.

Closures are so commonplace that they no longer stir protest as they once did — but they should, because the ecology of the high street is delicate. Anthony Browne of the British Bankers’ Association says: ‘Banks are very aware no customer or business should be left behind and branches play an important role in local communities.’