Hansard

I intend to make just a short speech this evening on a particular closure in my region. However, I begin by thanking Clare Haughey for lodging the motion and securing the debate. I also want to thank all colleagues who are taking part in the debate, and who have expressed many similar issues and themes about the dearth of face-to-face banking services in their communities.

Similar to what happened in the areas that Christine Grahame and Clare Haughey represent, Barrhead’s last remaining Bank of Scotland branch closed earlier last year. That had a significant impact, given that it was the last remaining bank in a town of that size. It also caused significant concern, particularly for older people in the community who required face-to-face banking.

What happened then was similar to what we have heard from other colleagues: a community campaign was mounted to try to make the Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group consider their position and think again. Five thousand people signed the petition, and numerous entreaties were made by me, my council colleagues, the local independent councillor Danny Devlin and our member of Parliament, Blair McDougall. However, all of that fell on deaf ears as far as Lloyds Banking Group was concerned.

That just speaks to the wider approach that Lloyds, and other banks, are taking in devaluing face-to-face services and not having them present in communities. Christine Grahame made an interesting point about mobile services; there also seems to be a shying away—or a moving away—from such services, which I know have been beneficial in other parts of my region.

Lloyds chose not to respond or meet us. Colleagues will not be surprised to hear that, when I took the 5,000-signature petition to the Mound, the man on the door took it and it just disappeared into the system. The community was then faced with a stark choice about what it did. Link, as we have heard from other colleagues, refused to bring a banking hub to the town, because, according to its criteria, the town was adequately served in terms of access by the post office and cash machines.

The community campaigners, the council, the MP and I then came together to think of other ways of getting some level of service into the community, and the credit union movement was very much at the forefront of those considerations. Barrhead—and, indeed, East Renfrewshire more generally—had been without a credit union for a number of years, since Pioneer Credit Union left the town, and we were able, in partnership with Pollok Credit Union, to bring a credit union presence to the main street for the first time in several years.

Of course, what a credit union does is allow people in a community to save, and it then pools those savings to guarantee loans and investments for its members.