Newspaper Column – The Cornishman – 30/09/25

• The decision to close Lloyds Bank in Penzance is wrong-headed. It comes exactly 100 years after the Bank took over the western part of the Market House. It’s sadly typical of a mentality which pervades modern, remote centralised management. Many essential service providers have become estranged from the public who’ve based their strategic planning on a naive self-confidence in digital systems. 

I’ve already written to complain to Lloyds CEO, Charlie Nunn. If he doesn’t think again, it’s time Government and big banks recognised we’ve already gone beyond ‘peak digital’. It’s unwise to pretend that services – especially public services and banks – can properly serve the digitally and financially excluded in our communities. Electronic communication has already shown itself to be excessively vulnerable to increasing levels of cyber-attack and espionage. 

A large proportion of especially single older people, who are already digitally excluded, will be made even more isolated. 

This can only have a detrimental impact on our local economy and commercial morale in the town. 

I’m not a ‘Luddite’ and readily acknowledge the many improvements and efficiencies which IT can bring. But it’s wrong to set up systems which favour the digitally enabled above those who are not. Indeed, even those who successfully navigate these dehumanised systems often struggle, and when those systems fail, customers are locked out with limited means to resolve their issue. You’ll of course be met with “FAQs” which address the blindingly obvious, ambiguous systems designed for the convenience of the service providers, or automated telephone handling systems which, though assuring your “call is important to us”, operate as if deliberately calculated to stall and frustrate. 

If banks plan to withdraw from our larger towns like this, then they must do more than offer extremely limited services through the shrinking network of Post Office branches and the extremely limited sop of a few (easily withdrawn when inconvenient to them) banking hubs. 

 

• I’m also backing the campaign against the government’s proposal to impose compulsory digital ID on all citizens. I welcome the petition which secured over 2 million supporters last weekend.  If PM Starmer were offering an opt-in digital system to aid improved efficiency of public services, the better management of health records, voter entitlement, passport records etc that would be fine and a useful tool to help those who opt to use. But to impose a mandatory ID system would cross a line; and draw the government into the risk of future state surveillance. It would lock out older, disabled people and the digitally excluded, and become a honeypot for malevolent hackers and espionage. 

Instead of wasting money on this, the government should invest in our schools, resolve the SEND crisis, back our children’s future, restore our NHS, build social housing, improve public transport and work to make our country a better place to live. I’ve already been contacted by hundreds of constituents who are alarmed at the proposal.