I don’t understand how people can function without a bank account
Helping the 2 million without a bank account to get one seems like an obvious priority
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I don’t fully understand it either, but I know it’s a reality.
Whether it NEEDS sorted is an entirely different conversation mind you. Who decides that? Are we happy that the government makes that decision for us? What is the timescale? What are the blockers? Given recent announcements about changes to immigration to the UK how will that impact people wanting to get bank accounts here? The technology side is the easy bit…
It’s an illusion.
In case of a political or economical collapse, these pieces of paper will hold no more value.
Paper or digital, fiat money is fiat money, whose actual definition is has value only because a government maintains its value.
That is true, but what happens if there’s just a temporary power cut in your area and you need to buy lunch or something. How will you pay without cash?
Most shops would be closed because of electronic point of sale
That’s just not true. Loads of small businesses wouldn’t care about it as they use cash primarily anyway. And loads use mobile phones for non-cash payment processing so powercut will not stop them working for the day.
Ah oh, London. I keep forgetting that everywhere apparently works the same as London, even when it doesn’t
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I’d want to burn my cash to keep warm 
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Tried that but the pennies just won’t light
They are better, they hold heat much longer so just chuck all the pennies on a fire, then pick them out and instant (scalding) warmth! Ta da!
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50p gives 50 times the heat, right?
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Of course, you think it’s 50p for any other reason? I’ve got me some £2 coins stashed for the really cold nights!
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Didn’t know Suffolk is considered London now …
Theft as defined in our current legislature is only applicable if there was no intent to pay and there is intent to permanently deprive the merchant of funds it is entitled to. If it declines because of an outage, you’d simply give the merchant your contact details and pay at a later reasonable time.
Alternatively, merchant’s POS terminal does all the validation to check the card is legitimate (correct BIN etc) and then stores every transaction in a queue to be fulfilled when Visa/MasterCard is back online.
That or maybe it just becomes more important for people to carry both Visa and MasterCard at the same time, banks will perhaps start to issue both.
Also, power cuts for a few hours wouldn’t kill a POS. Even Barclays ones these days have internal batteries so you can keep them behind the counter to charge until the customer needs it, they last a few hours too AFAIK.
I can also say small businesses aren’t mainly cash these days, as I work at one. Obviously it’s going to vary depending on the place in the UK, but we’ve seen a shift from mostly cash a few years back to mostly online payments and card today. It’s about 70/30 if I had to put a number to it. People just don’t carry cash these days.
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Even by your reckoning 30% of customers to your small business still carry cash. That’s roughly 2 MILLION people if you apply the same rough guess across the entire UK.
I can also give an example of a small business that is almost entirely cash, it’s been running successfully for over 4 years and very few customers ask for any other payment option.
Cash is still needed and will be for a long time.
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Well that’s one for definite, then 
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Cash isn’t needed /shrug people just have to adapt to the shifting times
More businesses will be going towards cards and any that don’t will fail, as falling access to free ATMs will have people paying by card
That just doesn’t follow.
Yes it does, “I don’t carry cash and there’s no ATM for 10 miles, I’ll have to go elsewhere”
Small communities where ATMs aren’t profitable sometimes have 25 miles to the nearest bank.
Are you simply refusing to acknowledge the fact that there are a large number of people without a bank account? How is cash not needed for them?
By your own numbers, right now about 2 million people use cash regularly. So is this a future statement that in 20 years time it may never be needed?