Dear Owl,

The proposed closure of Santander Bank in Rolle Street Exmouth, has been greeted with dismay by hundreds of customers.  Santander has claimed that the fall in the number of customers visiting the bank and the increase in online banking removed the necessity for a high street presence in Exmouth.  However, the bank’s closure will cause major disruption to many residents and surrounding areas who rely on the excellent counter service that that staff provide at the Exmouth Branch.

Many elderly and disabled residents rely on the counter service to do their banking and could not cope with an online only service.  I stood for an hour last week collecting signatures from customers who opposed the bank closures.  It was distressing to hear from these customers the devastating impact that Santander’s branch closure would have on them.

Santander, like the other high street banks in Exmouth who have stopped providing face to face customer services are failing their loyal customers for the pursuit of even more grotesque profits. Santander’s profits of 12,574 million euros in 2024 represented a 14% increase on 2023.  Not too shabby for a bank that seeks to wring maximum profit from its banking operations regardless of the personal cost to its customers.

The hands off approach taken by successive governments to high street bank closures needs to be re-examined.  Why does the government not impose a swingeing wealth tax on those banks who are closing their branches and reward those banks and building societies which remain on in our towns and cities with preferential tax rates?  If governments provided disincentives for banks to close their branches, it would be a lifeline to the millions of elderly and disabled customers who would find online banking alone extremely difficult if not impossible to manage.  Such a policy would also  help small businesses in towns and cities to operate with a local bank available for their banking requirements.

Katherine Wilcox

[Katherine is a longstanding correspondent on consumer issues.]

Do we expect this every time we have a spot of rain?

https://www.sewagemap.co.uk/

This map shows, in real-time, which river sections are downstream of sewage discharges from storm overflows.

About the Data

The data is collected through Event Duration Monitoring by individual water companies, providing near-real time data on storm overflows. The data is accessed from the Storm Overflow Hub maintained by Water UK. Storm overflows release untreated, diluted sewage into the environment. Currently, only Thames Water provide an API to historical sewage spill data. We wrote an article about why water companies need to be more transparent with environmental models and data in 

This site was created by Alex Lipp (UCL) &  Jonny Dawe.