Law needed to protect the right to use cash - Yorkshire Post Letters

Yesterday, I visited my local supermarket to buy the newspaper.

When I went to pay for this single item, I was astonished to find that only one of the twelve self-service check-outs was set up to take cash. It was in use, while most of the other eleven were free.

Two days earlier when I went to pick up a drill which had been in for servicing, the cashier apologised to me that their cash machine was down. Fortunately, I had cash on me, and they were willing to take it. Otherwise, it would have been a wasted journey. To varying degrees all the supermarkets restrict the use of cash.

What happens when they stop accepting cash and the government phases it out completely? What happens, when there is a nationwide system outage, as happened to Visa some years ago, or a major cyber-attack by a hostile state (Russia comes to mind)?

We will be entirely dependent on reliable electricity supply, telecommunications and electronic card processing. If any of these are down, we won’t even be able to buy a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread. The political parties, the civil service and big business are leading us on a sleepwalk to a fragile payments system.

To ensure resilience we need legislation to protect the right to use cash.