High streets in most towns, including those here in Lincolnshire, are being altered – and not for the better. Little makes the declining dignity of town centres clearer than bank closures. As these greedy corporate giants neglect their customers, by retreating to the anonymity of the internet, both towns and banks are driven down market.
Long familiar institutions have abandoned our high streets, obliging their customers to choose between travelling miles for services, which were once at hand, or face the sterile, impersonal, maze of online banking. Dishonestly, the big banks claim that closures are a response to shifting consumer behaviours. Whereas, in truth, it is their policies and practices that have forced customers online, as accounts can be neither opened, altered, or closed in any other way.
While internet banking is now established, it should not have signed the death of personal, relationship-based, local banking. The rapacious money dealers would have us believe that branches are commercially untenable and so costs must be cut – all of which might be plausible – if the five largest banks hadn’t totalled £39 billion in profits last year alone! As they made these eyewatering margins, bank bosses closed another 432 branches, depriving customers of effective banking services and access to the cash on which so many individuals and small businesses depend. In recent years banks have closed in Spalding, Holbeach, Long Sutton, Sutton Bridge, Crowland, Donnington, and the Deepings.
A noble exception is the Nationwide Building Society, the Spalding branch of which I visited last month. It has turned ‘proper’ banking into its unique selling point, bucking the trend that has become the habit of other banks.
Evidence from The Payment Choice Alliance makes clear that the elderly, disabled, disadvantaged, and small businesses struggle most with bank closures, a problem which is made more acute in rural areas like ours. The Royal National Institute of Blind People found 28% of blind and partially sighted people have never used the internet – disproving any claims by banks that online banking would service their needs.
Mindful of all this, I have, for some time championed banking hubs as a viable alternative. Such facilities, often operated by the Post Office, combine the services of the largest banks by providing important advice and support face-to-face.
In November 2025, there were 191 banking hubs across the country, and the Government has committed to opening 350 hubs by 2029, but given the volume of bank closures, that is just not enough. Any solution must account for the scale of the problem it aims to fix. To put the Government’s plan into perspective, since 2015, two bank branches have closed each day – totalling 15,000. That is why, last week, I called in Parliament for the automatic prevision of a banking hub in any community where the last bank branch has closed – a proposal supported by 98% of MPs. This would mean that over 1200 hubs could play their part in reviving high streets and rebuilding trust in banks nationwide.