The importance of public engagement in maintaining trust in banknotes - Speech by Victoria Cleland
SPEECH DIGEST
NEUTRAL high confidence · 12.6k characters readA Bank of England speech by Victoria Cleland on maintaining public trust in banknotes: availability, counterfeit resilience and the public consultation that chose UK wildlife (puffin, barn owl, bumblebee, hedgehog) for Series H. There is no monetary policy content here at all: no Bank Rate, no inflation, no vote, no balance of views, no forward guidance. For the rates desk this is a non-event, useful only as background on the cash ecosystem and the structural decline in cash usage.
What’s new: Nothing material for markets. The operational facts are new-ish (a £91.5bn note circulation figure as at end-February 2026, cash at 8% of transactions in 2025) but they carry no signal for the front end or the curve. The Series H design selection is already public from last week's announcement.
KEY FINDINGS
- Cash accounted for 8% of UK transactions in 2025, down from 45% a decade earlier, yet the value of Bank of England notes in circulation reached £91.5 billion at end-February 2026. Confirms the structural story the desk already knows: transactional cash keeps dying while hoarding demand keeps the note stock rising, so nothing here shifts the policy debate.
- The Bank has taken on a new role supervising wholesale cash firms operating cash centres and their backing FIs, with the FCA holding powers to protect retail access to cash. A regulatory plumbing change for the cash industry, not a macro input; no read-through to rates.
- The next series (Series H) is in design with counterfeit resilience as the stated driver, and the Bank used a two-stage public consultation with almost half a million participants. Public-facing operational news only; zero pricing content.
- The speech contains no reference to Bank Rate, inflation, the MPC, the vote split or the economic outlook. Sets the honest baseline: this is not a policy document and should not be traded as one.
FROM THE DOCUMENT
The use of cash for transactions has declined over recent years, accounting for 8% of all transactions in the UK in 2025, down from 45% a decade earlier.
And the value of Bank of England notes in circulation has continued to increase, reaching £91.5 billion at the end of February 2026.
Speech at the Intergraf Currency & Identity Conference, Denmark
Trust is essential to everything the Bank of England (the Bank) does. It underpins all our activities, from setting Bank Rate to operating payment settlement systems and much in between. And banknotes are among the most visible manifestations of that trust. The Bank is the second oldest central bank in the world and issuing banknotes (originally promissory notes) was one of its earliest functions. Historically, confidence in banknotes was linked to their convertibility into gold. You can still see the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand’ on our banknotes. While the nature of that promise has evolved over time and our notes are now indirectly backed by UK government bonds, 1 the principle remains the same: banknotes derive their value from trust, and that trust must be maintained. Every time someone accepts a banknote, they trust that it is authentic and worth the value stated.