With apologies to the panel for the detail—and do please stop me if this gets too detailed—we offer an ad hoc walk-in service for all businesses. About 92 per cent or 93 per cent of all business deposits are less than £2,000. You can walk into any post office and deposit up to £2,000 into your account anywhere in the country.
Many businesses that go way above that each week. Approximately 4,000 of our 11,500 branches take in more than 80 per cent of our business deposits. Those branches are the ones in which we invest in fortress counters. You might recognise the Perspex windows and a specific area where business deposits can be made. We direct customers who have larger sums of money to those branches each week.
We also locate those branches for the customer through a location exercise. We work with the bank and the customer and we introduce the postmaster to the business. We tell the customer that if they want to deposit £20,000, £30,000 or £50,000 a week on a Thursday, they will have to go to a certain post office. It will welcome them, take the money securely, put it in the safe and dispose of it. Therefore, there is a limit of £2,000 for any post office but, in specific areas and across those 4,000 branches, we can take any sum that the business cares to deposit. In that case there are no limits; it just has to be arranged.
There are again no limits on cash. If a small business wants to withdraw coin and cash for an opening float or maybe to pay cash to temporary workers through the summer season, they can draw out any amount of cash they wish. We ask for 48 hours’ notice so that we can provide a block of change—house-brick sized lumps of coin—when they come in. We can deliver that to the branch or it can be collected by the customer. It just requires pre-arrangement for some of the larger sums.
We are back to the point about awareness. If a small business does not know how to operate its account through us, we are very happy to help but the banks and the Post Office and the Government need to raise awareness collectively.