Cav's Place

While the matter was pretty widely reported here, mainly in relation to the fact that restricting cash payments quite severely is part of a package of measures that our government is pushing through, it seems difficult to find articles in English, on sites that don’t restrict access, that mention an opinion submitted by the European Central Bank regarding an initiative intended to clarify the legal tender status of Euro banknotes and coins, in which the ECB stresses the importance of the continued availability of cash payments and actually requests a ban on “no cash” policies. I found one, but if you’re interested you should probably at least skim the actual opinion, even if it’s annoyingly only available as a PDF, not a plain page…
Of course, there’s also the ECB’s page about the role of cash, which does a really good job of briefly and accurately explaining the benefits of sticking to cash and therefore should be taken as a statement of the institution’s position on the matter, but such a formal and firm opinion expressed just these days makes things even clearer and is something of a relief, considering how things are going from this point of view.
Unfortunately, however, that same opinion stresses that the regulations only apply to places where the Euro is used, so it doesn’t directly help us over here, or for example those in Sweden, which was quite determined to become a cashless society, and even less so those in the United Kingdom, where I keep seeing that access to cash is becoming more and more of a problem in plenty of areas. But, again, having such an institution clearly specify such a stance, and such a request, at the present time, not simply referring to past statements, can apply some pressure on those who push things in that particular wrong direction, and perhaps relieve some of the pressure felt by those who, for any or all of those listed reasons, choose to stick to cash.