Shropshire Star comment: Bank closures make mockery of customer coming first

At this rate, Shropshire's smallest towns and villages are going to be places with little or nothing going for them, except living there. There will be no banks, shops, pubs, or local services, and you'll have to send your children miles to get to school.

Barclays has announced that it is closing its bank branches in Much Wenlock, Church Stretton, Newport, and Wem. This is another drop in that drip, drip of decline.

Looked at in terms of customer service, it is difficult to see how such closures will do anything other than make things more difficult for customers. Not all customers though. These days there must be a lot of people who have never walked through the doors of a bank. But equally there are customers who have been brought up with physical banks and it is their way of doing banking business.

Their interests are now being tossed aside in the name of so-called progress. As Age UK points out, it is older people who are being disproportionately hit.

They are being given a very modern choice. They can either like it, or they can lump it. The customer comes first? That is a joke. The customer comes last, after banking profits and administrative convenience. If they get rid of a physical bank, they do not need to pay any staff to run it, nor any of the associated overheads which come with bricks and mortar.

Older customers will be advised to do their business online in future. Some will not know how to. Others will know how to but will feel very uncomfortable, and who could blame them when the internet is a cesspit of fraud and crime the scale of which is masked because of the massive scale of the internet itself.

Such closures affect the vitality of our smaller towns. Every closure means they have less and less to offer, and fewer and fewer reasons for anybody to visit their town centre streets.

There is one form of banks which are not seeing closures. They are the food banks, which have become a sort of barometer of austerity.

Across Mid Wales, a number of new ones have opened, and according to a Powys councillor and anti-poverty champion, those which are open are becoming increasingly stretched.

You do not need to look far to see the difference between the commercial banks and the food banks.

Food banks are not out to make profits. They are there to help people.