Chequing out

This week, another once reassuringly familiar aspect of our daily lives has been deemed too outdated to be allowed to encroach too far into the twenty-first century.   The cheque is next up to be written into history.

At the behest of a usually faceless committee going under the moniker the Payments Council, this three centuries' old method of payment will become a relic as of 2018.   I use the term "usually faceless," because, on the day of the announcement, a representative from the organisation hawked himself around various media outlets to tell us all how little we use cheques these days.   Granted, their use has more than halved from a peak in 1990, but something about this method of payment still prompts us to write four million of them a day.

The Payments Council admits there are certain situations in which only a cheque will do - and says an alternative will have to be developed in the next few years.   If, like me, you're asking why we need a safe, easy alternative to the cheque when we have, er, the cheque, then the answer is simple - cost.   It costs our cash-strapped banks £1 to process cheques (in a delightfully quaint process which involves all cheques being gathered and inspected in London),  but only a quarter of that to administer a chip and pin payment.

Self-evidently, debit and, more worryingly, credit cards are a more convenient method of payment in many instances than the cheque.   The days of having to register your intention to use one of these new-fangled plastic cards before you did your weekly shop at the supermarket (and I'm sure I haven't imagined that) are long gone.   So I'm not suggesting we retain expensive clearing apparatus when only a couple of octogenarians in Western Super Mare are still writing them - but why can't the consumer decide if and when they want to abandon the cheque altogether?   Apparently, in these situations, bodies like the Payments Council bear a responsibility to "manage decline."   Is that manage, or hasten?