For the last decade, the banking giants and financial technology evangelists have been desperately trying to convince us that physical money is dead. We were told that notes and coins were dusty relics of the past, and that the glorious, friction-free “cashless society” was inevitable.

There is just one tiny problem with their grand vision: reality didn’t get the memo. Over the last four years, something rather remarkable has happened across the UK. Far from disappearing, physical cash has staged a stubborn, undeniable comeback. According to major banking figures, including four consecutive years of rising cash point withdrawals reported by Nationwide, people are actively reaching back for notes and coins.

Driven by the cost-of-living crisis, families and individuals have rediscovered a fundamental truth that no budgeting app can replicate. When you have cash in your wallet, you know exactly how much you have left to spend. Across the country, people are withdrawing more cash, budgeting with physical notes and coins, and demanding that local businesses keep taking real money.

Calne’s weekend cash-access gap

Which brings us, naturally, to the baffling situation right here in Calne.

While the rest of Britain is waking up to the enduring value of physical cash, trying to actually get your hands on your own money in Calne on a Saturday or Sunday feels like a competitive obstacle course. As I highlighted back in August in Calne Needs Better Weekend Access to Cash, the closure of our town centre Post Office left a gaping hole in our high street infrastructure. Yes, we rightly welcomed, the opening of the Calne Banking Hub and during the week, for the last two years, it has been a vital lifeline. But the moment 5:00 PM hits on a Friday afternoon, the shutters come down, and the hub stays firmly locked until Monday morning.

Think about the sheer absurdity of that. The weekend is precisely when people who work full-time during the week are actually in town. It is when families are shopping on the high street, visiting local cafés, paying tradespeople, or heading out to community events. Yet, at the exact moment local commerce should be thriving, our primary banking facility remains firmnly closed for business.

The problem with measuring weekend demand

To make matters worse, when Cash Access UK was recently asked about trialling Saturday opening hours here, the response was the classic bureaucratic catch-22: they claimed, “current usage figures do not justify extending its opening hours”. Of course, the usage figures don’t show Saturday demand when the doors are locked every Saturday! It’s like closing a pub every Friday night and concluding nobody in town likes a pint on a Friday night!

Meanwhile, residents are left playing roulette with the few remaining cash machines scattered around town, hoping they haven’t run out of notes by Saturday lunchtime, or forced to trek out to the fringes of town just to withdraw a tenner. For our elderly residents, the digitally excluded, and the small independent businesses struggling to survive on our high street, a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 cash service simply isn’t good enough.

Time for better access to cash

The last four years have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that cash isn’t going anywhere. People rely on it, businesses need it, and our high street depends on it, and if the lights go out, it maybe the only way you could buy food! It’s time the powers that be stopped treating weekend access to cash as an optional luxury and give Calne the weekend cash access this town actually deserves.