Post Office to install fee-charging cash machines

THE Post Office, champion of the underprivileged, is to install fee-charging cash machines at 2000 locations countrywide.

One in five post office ATMs is already charging customers £1 every time they withdraw money. News of the charges comes less than a year after banks were forced to scrap all cash-machine charges following Government threats and amid national outcry.

Cash machines are currently available at just 500 post offices but the intention is to roll them out to at least 3000 branches over the next 18 months. Two thirds of these are expected to levy a charge.

Four financial institutions are behind the organisation’s ATM network – Alliance & Leicester, Halifax, Nationwide and Euronet Worldwide, an electronic finance specialist based in Kansas and Budapest.

Of these, only A&L and Euronet levy charges.

“We have two sorts of ATM.

The standard bank-branch ones are free but we also have a range of convenience-store machines where people who are not Alliance & Leicester customers are charged,” said an A&L spokesman.

The Post Office does not receive a cut from cashmachine charges but is paid a fee per transaction. It justifies the £1 levy by saying that many branches are in remote locations and their ATMs would not be economically viable unless customers were charged.

Halifax said: “We have a policy of not charging for ATMs and it is part of our strategy to introduce machines into remote locations.” Nationwide said: “We very much believe that cash machines are an added service for which we do not need to charge.”

The Post Office invited every financial institution in Britain the chance to participate in its cash-machines programme but most declined. The four that accepted are sent lists of available locations and then discuss with the Post Office where they would like to be.

Barclays first provoked the row over cash-machine charges in the summer of 1999 when it announced plans to levy a £1 charge on all noncustomers. It then transpired that many banks were already charging their own customers every time they used rival ATMs.

After furious rows, every lender agreed to make cashmachine usage free from January 2001. Post offices are said to be in a different category because many of them are in rural locations, which means the number of cash-machine transactions per branch is much smaller.