Recommendation 15

The demand for notes has increased in each of the past 25 years. According to Bank figures, in July 2020 the number of notes in circulation reached a record high of 4.4 billion, with a monetary value of £76.5 billion.40 Notes are increasingly being used as a store of value and therefore the demand for notes has been less affected by the wider decline in the use of cash for transactions. This trend has been seen among other major currencies around the world. The Bank told us that an important reason for this could be the lowering of inflation and interest rates from the mid 1990’s, reducing the opportunity cost of holding cash as a store of wealth.41