Access to cash coverage in the UK 2022 Q1

This is an overview of geographical cash access coverage in the UK at the end of the first quarter (January to March) of 2022.

1. Introduction

On a quarterly basis, with the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), we gather and update data on access to cash. This captures the locations of cash access points and other relevant information like temporary closures, opening hours, and accessibility. This data covers brick-and-mortar, mobile bank, and building society branches, automated teller machines (ATMs), and the Post Office network. We supplement this information with annual data on cashback locations.

This analysis provides insights on the proportion of the population that lives within a range of distances of various cash access points. For this and future updates we have updated our methodology on estimating coverage. We still measure distances as the crow flies (see note 1), consistent with the approaches adopted by LINK and the Post Office. In previous coverage analysis we estimated access based on geographic coverage (i.e. how much land is within, say, 2km of a cash access point. However, we now measure distances directly from all UK residential addresses. We believe our updated methodology represents a more accurate picture of access to cash coverage in the UK relative to where people live.

We estimate that for access to any bank, building society, Post Office branch, or any ATM (either free or pay-to-use) in 2022 Q1:

• 96.6% of the UK population are currently within 2km of a cash access point
• 99.8% of the UK population are currently within 5km of a cash access point
• 96.4% of the UK population are currently within 2km of a free-to-use cash access point
• 99.8% of the UK population are currently within 5km of a free-to-use cash access point

During this period there were changes in the type of access points available. Between 2021 Q4 and 2022 Q1:

• The number of brick-and-mortar branches of the larger banks and building societies providing personal current accounts (PCA) fell by 184, a decrease of 3.5%. Since 2021 Q1, such branches have declined in number by 757, or 12.9%.
• There was a small increase in the availability of Post Office branches (1.6%).
• Whilst there was a negligible decrease in the number of free-to-use ATMs, the number of pay-to-use ATMs dropped considerably by 787, a decrease of 6.3%.

Despite a reduction in access points our coverage figures are higher for 2022 Q1 compared to 2021 Q4. This is primarily driven by the changes in our methodology. As a result we cannot directly compare changes in coverage between these periods on a like-for-like basis and infer any improvement in coverage.

Our analysis of other access characteristics finds that during this period:

• There was no change in overall weekly opening hours for banks, building societies and post offices.
• Temporary closures of Type A (brick-and-mortar branches of a larger PCA provider) showed a small increase from 2021 Q4 to 38.8%. It is not possible to get reliable results for Type B (smaller bank and building society branches) due to a high proportion of branches not returning data.

2. Coverage

The data comprises 70,791 known UK cash access points and 485,704 cashback locations. Table 1 shows numbers by region for 8 types of access points (see notes 3, 4, and 5):

• Types A and B are brick-and-mortar bank and building society branches provided by (A) larger PCA providers and (B) all other banks and building societies, respectively.
  Type B branches may offer more limited deposit and withdrawal services compared to Type A branches, for example, a building society that specialises in mortgages or savings accounts.
• Mobile bank branches (measured by stops) are a separate type (D).
• Post Office branches are subdivided into mobile / outreach branches (type E) and all other Post Office branches (type C). The outreach branches are brick-and-mortar but are more similar to mobile branches being typically open for a small number of hours or on selected days of the week. For example, these include limited time to serve access points in community buildings in rural locations. For this reason, we group the mobile and outreach branches together.
• ATMs are subdivided into free-to-use (type F) and pay-to-use (type G).
• Cashback locations (type H) are all the unique locations where a cashback transaction took place in 2020.

Table 1: Number of cash access points by type and geographical area

Download Table 1 

We have analysed coverage for 14 groups of cash access points which we define in Table 2. The groups are constructed by combining the cash access point types and cashback locations:

• group 1 includes type A (larger banks and building societies providing PCA) access points only
• group 2 adds the non-mobile/outreach Post Office network
• group 3 includes all brick-and-mortar (except type B) and mobile/outreach bank, building society, and Post Office branches, representing all known locations where customers can access banking services beyond cash withdrawals or deposits
• groups 4 and 5 include the same cash access point types as Group 3, as well as all free-to-use ATMs and all ATMs respectively
• group 6 includes type B branches and contains all free-to-use access points.
• group 7 includes all 70,791 known cash access points
• groups 8 and 9 focus on access to ATMs, for free-to-use and all ATMs respectively
• groups 10, 11, and 12 combine free-to-use access points, all access points and all ATMs respectively with cashback locations
• groups 13 and 14 focus on access to the Post Office network distinguishing between non-mobile/outreach branches and all branches

Due to substitutability, as outlined above, type B branches are only included in groups 6, 7, 10, and 11.

Table 2: Groupings of cash access points

On this web page we provide highlights of coverage in Table 3. We present data for Groups 3 and 6 as proxies for cash deposit and free cash withdrawal access for consumers. We provide these figures for Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole split by overall, rural and urban at distances 2km and 5km. For ease of understanding we have also provided figures in nearest whole miles (1 mile and 3 miles).

Table 3: Percentages of the UK population that have access to a source of cash within a given distance as of 2022 Q2 (groups 3 and 6)

Group 3

Larger banks and building societies providing PCA and Post Office: all branches, including mobile 2022 Q1

Group 6

All free-to-use cash access points (excluding cashback) 2022 Q1

Estimated percentages of the UK population living within a given distance from a cash access point for all groups 1-14 (see notes 6, 7, and 8).

We give the estimates for the UK regions and devolved nations separately, as well as for England and the UK overall. Estimates for rural and urban areas are also given (see note 9).

The distances considered are 1, 2, 5, 8, and 16 km (approximately 0.6, 1.2, 3, 5, and 10 miles, respectively).

Figure 1 shows the coverage areas underlying the population estimates for groups 1-14. In each case the areas shown are those without access to a source of cash within 1, 2, 5, 8, or 16 km. The areas shown in white have a cash access point within 1 km or nearer. The interactive tooltips show percentages of the Local Authority District population that have access to a source of cash within the above range of distances.

Figure 1: Access to cash coverage in the UK in 2022 Q1

View the maps in Tableau Public

3. Other insights

3.1. Temporary closures

We cannot give precise figures for temporary closures because a high proportion of branches did not provide this information.  But there has been increase in the overall number of days closed across type A (large PCA providers) since 2021 Q4.  Of type A branches that did provide this information (88%) there were 38% that were temporarily closed for a least one day, which is a small increase on 2021 Q4 (34%).

We do not have equivalent information for Post Office branches.

3.2. Opening hours

While external and stand-alone ATMs are always accessible, in-branch cash withdrawals and deposits and other banking services are only available during branch opening hours.

Figure 2 shows the percentages of branches open at a given time between 7am and 7pm, Monday to Saturday (see note 10), by branch types defined in Table 1.

Figure 2: Percentages of branches open at a given time by branch type

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3.3. Accessibility

For some consumers, being able to use branch services depends on accessibility features.

Table 4 shows percentages of branches which are wheelchair accessible, have step-free access and/or have a hearing/induction loop available for the 3 types of bank and building society branches (see note 10) as well as Post Office branches. The step-free access characteristic does not apply to mobile branches (see note 11).

Of the brick-and-mortar bank and building society branches, 63.1% of type A (larger PCA providers) and 54.6% of type B (other) branches have all 3 accessibility features. Excluding the branches for which some values are unreported, these percentages become 88.4% and 74.3% respectively. 85.3% of Post Office (excluding mobile and outreach) branches have both wheelchair access and a hearing/induction loop. We do not have information on step-free accessibility for Post Office branches.

Table 4: Percentages of branches with common accessibility characteristics by branch type

Download Table 4 

Notes

1. Relative to analogous travel distance, the approach based on straight line distances is likely to overestimate coverage and underestimate the areas with no coverage. The effect is likely to be more important for longer, non-walkable distances. All computations are performed in the British National Grid (OSGB 1936) projection.
2. Our current approach measures straight line distances from residential addresses to their nearest access point by type. To determine aggregate coverage percentages we estimate the total number of residential properties within a set distance of an access point at a certain geographical level (e.g. Output Area, Local Authority District, Country etc). Due to a change in methodology effective from the 2022 Q1 analysis it is not possible to directly compare coverage analysis for this or future quarters with analysis undertaken for 2021. Based on testing between methodologies undertaken using 2021 Q4 data we do not believe conclusions based on key headline figures are significantly affected by the choice of methodology.
3. The counts in Table 1 are for all known access points. The number of unique locations offering access will be smaller because, for example, a typical branch will have one or more internal and/or one or more external ATMs, and these are counted separately. This does not apply to cashback vendor locations as only unique locations are counted (see also note 4). There are no mobile bank branches or mobile/ outreach Post Office branches in London.
4. Cashback locations are the unique locations of vendors which are known to have offered cashback at some point in 2020 to customers using either a Mastercard or a Visa card. There could be other merchants offering cashback not included in this dataset, either because no transaction involving cashback took place or because such transactions did not involve Visa or Mastercard.
5. While we have made every effort to ensure the dataset is complete and up to date, there may still be some omissions or other discrepancies. This dataset does not include ATMs that were temporarily closed at the time the data was collected. Data on some smaller banking companies may be missing, and not all recent branch closures, openings or other changes may have been reflected. Where a bank or building society has not provided data, we have used submissions from previous quarters. Of the Post Office branches, we included only those classified by the Post Office as active at the time the data was collected.
6. All population estimates are based on 2011 census output area (OA) geographies (small areas in Northern Ireland), mid-2020 estimates of the usual resident population for OAs in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales, and for Data Zones in Scotland. Population estimates for OAs in Scotland are obtained by proportionally adjusting the 2011 census estimates using the aggregate mid-2021 population estimates for Data Zones. We compute the population estimates for arbitrary areas based on the assumption that population density is uniform over each OA. For ease of reference, columns ‘Population, 000’s’ in Table 3 reproduce these population estimates (in thousands) for all included areas.
7. While we have made every effort to get precise locations of all access points, some locations are precise to their respective postcode centroids only. In most cases the locations used in this analysis are those supplied by banks, building societies, the Post Office, the LINK Scheme Ltd, Visa, and Mastercard.
8. All estimates in Table 3 are reported to 1 decimal place precision. For some groups the estimates are very similar or nearly identical, for example those for groups 7 (all cash access points) and 5 (all except type B). This is because many cash access points, particularly bank and building society branches, tend to cluster around settlement centres.
9. The definitions used for rural-urban classification differ between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the case of Northern Ireland, for simplicity, we have reallocated the 165 out of 4,537 small areas originally assigned to a mixed rural/urban category to either rural or urban category based on their band. We have allocated bands A-E as urban and F-H as rural; see NISRA Urban-Rural Classification 2015 for more details.
10. Some Post Office branches are also open before 7am and/or after 7pm, and some are also open on Sundays – these are not shown in Figure 2. Mobile stops and outreach branches are typically open for a small number of hours on selected days of the week, so the overall proportions of these branches open at a given time are generally low.
11. Proportions given in the ‘excluding unreported’ rows in Table 4 are unbiased estimates of the respective true proportions where there is no connection between the non-reporting and the value of the characteristic in question. Proportions given in the ‘all data’ rows represent worst-case scenario bounds. For example, if all the 21.1% of mobile bank branches (type D) for which step-free access is unreported are, in fact, step-free accessible, the overall proportions will be 21.1% and 78.9%, whereas if none of them is step-free accessible, the overall proportions will be 0% and 100% for yes and no respectively. Symbols ‘x’ and ‘–’ in Table 4 denote ‘not applicable’ and ‘none’ (e. exactly zero) respectively. 

4. Attributions

In addition to the data collected from banks, building societies, and the Post Office, the analysis uses other open data and data licensed under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement.

• ATM data © LINK Scheme Ltd, LINK Network Members, and licensors copyright and database right 2022.
• Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021.
• Contains NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2022.
• Contains NISRA data © Crown copyright and database right 2021.
• Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database rights 2021/2022.
• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2022.
• Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.
• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• This product contains data created and maintained by Scottish Local Government.