Annabel Yates drove 94 miles from Crackington Haven to Truro on May 14 to pay in a £900 HM Revenue and Customs cheque after Lloyds Banking Group’s app could not scan it. The cheque had no perforated edges, and the nearest branch was the only place she could use to get the money into her account.
Yates, who lives in Cornwall, said she had not wanted such a large cheque sent through the post because there was no guarantee it would reach its destination. She said she believed the bank was acting as if everything could be done on an app, adding that it was “very backwards thinking” and a reversal of the old Lloyds idea of making banking easy.
The journey was a direct result of a rule change that took effect in January 2026, when Lloyds Banking Group customers, including Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers, could no longer pay cheques in through the Post Office. For people in rural areas, that closed off a service many had relied on for years and left them with fewer practical ways to handle paper payments.
Yates’s cheque could not be deposited through the bank app because it lacked perforated edges and would not scan. Her remaining options were the app, a freepost deposit service or a physical Lloyds branch. She chose the branch in Truro rather than trust the post or the mobile process for a payment from HMRC.
Joanna Bickersteth said many customers were frustrated by the loss of cheque deposit services at the Post Office since January and said cheques were still used a great deal in her area. She said the facilities available to customers had been reduced by taking away the post office element, while a new banking hub in Bude also cannot cash cheques under the same policy.
Lloyds has said cheques made up just 0.1% of all UK payments in 2024, a figure it has used to justify the change. But Yates’s experience shows how a tiny share of national payments can still create a very large problem for people who live far from a branch and cannot rely on digital workarounds. For her, the issue is not abstract: it is whether rural customers have been disenfranchised by a system that assumes every payment can be handled online.
