Is the Treasury secretly trying to scrap cash?

It is three months since the former chancellor Philip Hammond backtracked and announced that the government would not, after all, abolish pennies and two pences. But then comes the news that the Royal Mint has produced no new one pence and two pence coins for the past 12 months. So much for official policy – it seems that behind the scenes, Treasury officials are quietly getting on with the business of enacting the abolition of cash regardless.

True, there is a case for saying that the real value of a penny has been so eroded by inflation that it no longer serves any useful purpose – a penny in 1971, when decimalisation occurred, was worth the equivalent of 14 pence now. Yet at the same time as proposing to abolish pennies because they were worth too little, Hammond was proposing to abolish £50 notes on the grounds they were worth too much, and are only really used by money-launderers.