‘They have been predicting the end of cash for 20 years now and it keeps growing’: Victoria Cleland on the Bank of England's new polymer banknotes

Chief cashier Victoria Cleland’s name is about to appear on your banknotes. She’s not the only woman whose currency has risen on Mark Carney’s watch, says James Ashton
Ladies of Threadneedle Street: Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s chief cashier (Picture: Daniel Hambury)
James Ashton27 February 2015

Deep in the bowels of the Bank of England, you can almost smell the money. The only thing coming between my nose and billions of pounds of fresh banknotes is the plastic they are neatly wrapped in. At least I can see them: bale after bale of hard currency stacked in metal cages worth £10 million a time.

The overwhelming desire to grab a fistful of fifties wouldn’t go down well with the security guards who took me through a series of heavy, locked gates to get this far. Nor will they point me towards the Bank’s gold reserves, piled up down here in another vault off the warren of corridors. But I have the next best thing. Guiding my path is the woman who from next week will literally be on the money.

Victoria Cleland is the Bank’s chief cashier. She doesn’t count the notes but she signs them, with her first batch of £10, £20 and £50 notes about to go into circulation. Mark Carney might be the Governor but it is her name that will find its way into every wallet in the land.

“It took a while to get something that was legible,” she says of her autograph, which will be scrutinised as heavily as the watermarked Queen’s head. “It is my normal signature but I wrote it slightly more slowly. You need to fit it in quite a small space.”

Cleland is one of a cohort of women whose currency has risen on Carney’s watch. Compared with the senior arrivals of chief operating officer Charlotte Hogg and Nemat Shafik, the deputy governor for markets and banking, Cleland, 44, has been at Threadneedle Street half her life. After working on limiting the damage from the collapse of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, she transferred to the notes division five years ago, and was promoted last year to chief cashier — only the second woman in the post — the sole signatory on British banknotes since 1870.

There is plenty to the job, including maintaining faith in our money and its steady supply, but in a digital world you have to wonder if all these notes and coins are bit passé. Aren’t we all going cashless, flashing our plastic to pay for coffee just like we have for years on clothes shopping sprees? Cleland wrinkles her nose at the idea.

“They have been predicting the end of cash for the past 20 years and it keeps growing. My job is to make sure people still have the confidence to use it.”

It’s true. The value of notes in circulation goes up about five per cent a year. So even though the Payments Council predicts that non-cash payments will overtake notes and coins as the preferred choice for shoppers in the next few weeks, there is £60 billion of notes sloshing around Britain — under mattresses and in bureaux de change — close to £1,000 for each person in the country.

“Some people are using cash in a transactional way, some people are using it to budget. There is still an element of people hoarding cash or keeping it for a contingency,” says Cleland, whose office is a glass-fronted alcove with pictures of old regional notes from Rochdale and the like on the wall.

Peak banknote demand comes at times of celebration or panic. Think Christmas, Easter, royal weddings — or when Northern Rock collapsed and people queued down the street to get their hands on the folding stuff.

And that is the big surprise. None of the money stashed downstairs in the Bank is ever meant to be spent. It’s here to cope with “demand shock”, or in case its two cash centres in Debden, Essex, and Leeds go up in flames. Britain’s banknotes are printed in Debden, where the old stock, which smells of dirt and wine stains, is taken out of circulation and shredded.

Cash still excites strong emotions. During the storm of protest when Sir Winston Churchill was announced as the replacement for prison reformer Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note — leaving no female face on the reverse of a British banknote — Cleland was pictured on the steps of the Bank receiving a petition from women dressed as Emmeline Pankhurst and Boadicea. The Bank quickly moved to reveal that Jane Austen would succeed Charles Darwin on the £10 note.

“We have a rolling programme of notes and we had a Jane Austen design coming along next,” she says. “I think it was a sequencing thing. We tend to announce one character at a time. If you announce multiple characters it takes the limelight from any one of them.”

The Bank is unlikely to make that mistake again. It has set up a panel to canvas public opinion for the next face on the £20 note, with more scope for modern characters — providing they are dead and not fictitious.

“The old language used to be about broad name recognition and now it talks much more about having an impact on thought and values in society,” she says.

Born in Warwickshire, Cleland studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University and joined the Bank after realising accountancy wasn’t for her. She didn’t recognise the fusty image of the institution when she arrived.

Ladies of Threadneedle Street: Nemat Shafik, left, is the Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking and Charlotte Hogg is the Chief Operating Officer (Picture: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex/Bloomerg)

“On my first day I really did think it would be male-dominated and full of quite senior people, but of my graduate intake probably a third were women. I have never felt different because I am a woman, or dominated by the men.” Having led the Bank’s graduate recruitment programme, she has tried to overhaul the notion that it only wants to employ over-achieving economists from Oxbridge.

Tall, with long blonde hair, she is single, cycles to work and hits the gym every day. Whereas Carney is in training for the London Marathon, Cleland, who has a team of 130, prefers 100-mile charity bike rides in support of the Royal London Society for the Blind. Out of the saddle, she lives in west London, likes wine-tasting and going to the theatre.

There is more change to come on her watch. Plastic banknotes will go into circulation next year — first of all the fiver, with the tenner following in 2017. Polymer-based cash retains less moisture and dirt, lasts at least two-and- a-half times longer than paper notes and is more likely to survive a spin in the washing machine.

“The main thing is if people don’t like them but evidence from other countries is that people do. It’s a change and some people don’t like change but pretty much everyone I spoke to could understand the drivers for that change. The public acceptance from the roadshow was phenomenal.”

The plastic notes will also be harder to counterfeit, although upcoming statistics suggest the Bank is winning that war. Last year, the value of dodgy notes taken out of circulation was about £8 million, down a third on the £11.7million in the previous 12 months.

The most counterfeited denomination is the £20 because there are relatively few £50 notes in circulation, which means “people in shops will look at them a lot more”.

Including motion threads, silver strips, holograms, watermarks and various inks, every note has 20 ingredients. Away from the physical world, Cleland also has to monitor the progress of digital currencies, the best-known of which is Bitcoin.

“It is not at the moment very widely accepted. There are a couple of coffee shops in London [that take it], but generally it is not really on people’s horizon,” she says. “It is difficult to see how Bitcoin in its current guise could take off and replace more normal methods of payment.” Nor does it pose much of a threat to financial stability.

Back in the vault, Cleland guarantees the value of every note we can see, by promising to pay the bearer what it is worth. She believes cash is still king. Or should that be queen?

@mrjamesashton

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