The importance of public engagement in maintaining trust in banknotes - Speech by Victoria Cleland

Trust is essential to everything the Bank of England (the Bank) does. It underpins all our activities, from setting Bank Rate to operating payment settlement systems and much in between. And banknotes are among the most visible manifestations of that trust.

The Bank is the second oldest central bank in the world and issuing banknotes (originally promissory notes) was one of its earliest functions. Historically, confidence in banknotes was linked to their convertibility into gold. You can still see the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand’ on our banknotes. While the nature of that promise has evolved over time and our notes are now indirectly backed by UK government bonds,¹ the principle remains the same: banknotes derive their value from trust, and that trust must be maintained.

Every time someone accepts a banknote, they trust that it is authentic and worth the value stated. They have to be confident that it can be used again in the future: whether to spend it, save it or bank it. Without that trust, a banknote is simply an object, albeit with a beautiful design. With it, households spend, businesses trade and economies function.

Central banks play a crucial role in maintaining this trust in banknotes. We do so by ensuring banknotes are available, that the cash industry remains effective, resilient and sustainable, and that banknotes remain a secure method of payment.

Communicating openly with businesses and the public so that they can recognise and easily authenticate banknotes is also an essential part of maintaining this security. The Bank has engaged extensively with the UK public on the imagery for our next series of banknotes to ensure our banknotes remain recognisable as national symbols. This culminated in last week’s announcement that the Atlantic puffin, barn owl, buff-tailed bumblebee and European hedgehog will feature as the central imagery on our next series of banknotes.

I will now dive deeper into the Bank’s work to ensure this essential trust in our banknotes through availability, secure design and public engagement.

Ensuring trust through availability

The public need to trust that banknotes will be available when required. The Bank does not, and cannot, do this in isolation. Just as a beehive depends on its community of different bees performing complementary roles, maintaining trust in banknotes requires organisations across the cash ecosystem to work together.

Central banks, printers, cash centre operators, cash-in-transit companies, financial institutions and retailers are all important members of this ecosystem. They all play crucial and complementary roles in ensuring that the public can continue to access and use banknotes so that cash remains a trusted source of payments. At the Banknote Conference earlier this year,² I spoke about the importance of preserving choice in payments and the role of cash in preserving choice. Ensuring that choice remains requires the whole industry to work together like an efficient beehive. 

For the Bank, this includes issuing banknotes to meet public demand. The use of cash for transactions has declined over recent years, accounting for 8% of all transactions in the UK in 2025, down from 45% a decade earlier.³ But according to our research, cash is still the preferred payment method for one in seven people and, is used at least once a week by almost a quarter of the public. It is essential for some people and is seen as an important contingency by many.

And the value of Bank of England notes in circulation has continued to increase, reaching £91.5 billion at the end of February 2026. This demonstrates the enduring importance of cash to our economy and our society.

We are committed to meet the demand for our banknotes and to ensure that the right banknotes are available, in the right places at the right time. It is important to us that people and businesses who want to use cash can continue to do so. We do this by monitoring payment trends and a range of economic factors to inform demand forecasts and contingency requirements, and to help us decide how many banknotes we need our printer De La Rue to produce.

Authorities and industry must work closely together to ensure the cash cycle as a whole remains effective, resilient and sustainable. The wholesale cash distribution market is the underlying “plumbing” that gets cash to where it is needed, via cash centres through to ATMs and retailers. Last year, the Bank took on a new role to supervise firms in the wholesale cash industry who operate cash centres and their backing FIs.⁴ In addition, the Financial Conduct Authority has powers to protect retail access to cash for consumers. Together, these regimes will help ensure that cash will be available and accessible.

Ensuring trust through design

Another key component of trust in banknotes is counterfeit resilience: the public and businesses must be confident that the banknotes they receive are genuine. We do this by incorporating sophisticated security features into the design: these need to be both hard to counterfeit and easy to authenticate. For trust in the security of banknotes to endure, it is important that central banks change the design from time to time to incorporate the latest security features. This requires suppliers and manufacturers to innovate and invest in developing new technology and more resilient features. To maintain trust in banknotes, it is essential that this innovation continues. 

When you picture a puffin, you may think of its distinct colouring including its bright orange beak. Did you know their beaks glow under UV light, just like our banknotes? These markings and photoluminescence are not purely about aesthetic appeal but also serve a functional purpose in helping puffins lure prey, deter predators and attract mates. Similarly, at the Bank, we need to design banknotes that are not only attractive but also designed with function, particularly security, at their heart.

Our next series of banknotes (Series H) is currently being designed. The driver, as with any new series, is to further enhance counterfeit resilience. And following public consultation, the new notes will celebrate UK wildlife. Images of wildlife will also support resilience, enabling us to incorporate intuitive movements into the security features which are engaging and easy for the public to recognise and distinguish. 

Trust also stems from our notes being accessible to all. We are continuing to invest in banknote accessibility, running research on how people with disabilities use cash today and including tactile features to help people with visual impairments differentiate between denominations.

Ensuring trust through communication and engagement 

Trust in banknotes is founded on availability and effective design, but sustaining it requires engagement – with businesses, law enforcement and the public. Even the most sophisticated security feature is only effective if people know how to use it to verify a banknote. And so public engagement and communication are a pivotal part of our anticounterfeiting strategy.

The Bank provides free educational materials, such as booklets and posters to help businesses and the public to authenticate banknotes. We also provide online training and run a free Banknote Checking Scheme to help businesses keep a watchful eye out for counterfeits: a vigilance one could compare to the barn owl which will feature on our next series. This Scheme has grown considerably, now covering over 50,000 business locations.

Recently, we have supplemented this by launching a communications campaign aimed at businesses. This campaign shows business owners talking about their own experiences and how using best practice banknote checking has enhanced their trust in banknotes. We also engage closely with law enforcement, including the National Crime Agency and local police forces, to help them investigate and prosecute potential counterfeiters.

Incorporating images that resonate strongly with the public and which they can easily recognise is also a key part of banknote authentication and maintaining trust. So last year, we launched a two-stage process to engage the public in the choice of imagery for the next series of banknotes.

In July 2025, we announced that we would introduce a new series of banknotes with even more robust security features. A new series necessitates changes to the imagery, so we launched a consultation asking the UK public which theme they wanted to see featured in the design. The Bank has been celebrating historic figures on our banknotes since 1970. However there are many ways to represent the UK so we wanted to hear the views of the public, the users of our banknotes.

Around 60% of respondents chose nature as one of the themes they wanted to see featured with many nominating specific native animals. And this March, we announced that in the light of feedback from the consultation, images of UK wildlife would feature on the next series of our banknotes. We worked closely with a panel of wildlife experts to create a shortlist of native UK animals and in June we launched a second consultation asking the public to help us choose which of the shortlisted animals to feature as the central imagery on the next series. We were delighted by the scale of the response, with almost half a million people participating.

The Bank’s overarching objective is to increase counterfeit resilience through secure design, and for this to be effective, it is also important that the new series represents the UK and resonates with the users. After all, banknotes are not just a means of payment, but also a shared symbol of national identity. This helps to promote trust and security, as familiar imagery which resonates with the public will mean they look more closely at their banknotes. 

The importance of awareness and familiarity is not new. In 1797, when the Bank rushed to issue new £1 and £2 banknotes following gold shortages, counterfeiting surged as counterfeiters took advantage of people’s unfamiliarity with new banknotes. The lesson remains relevant today: when introducing a new series, issuers must bring the public along on the journey to ensure they can recognise and authenticate the notes.  

To do this successfully and inclusively, central banks need to engage people through different methods including the platforms they use every day. To help publicise our most recent consultation, the Bank used an integrated communication strategy which included press, social media, engagement with schools and visiting local communities around the UK. We also collaborated with influencers to help us reach young people and audiences who may not have engaged with the Bank’s work in the past.

We opened the consultation with a launch event at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) London Wetland Centre to celebrate the shortlisted animals and give journalists an opportunity to ask questions – both to me and the wildlife Expert Panel who helped us develop the shortlist of animals. This provided an engaging backdrop to create content about wildlife to help raise awareness and encourage participation in the consultation.

To sustain momentum, we produced a variety of engaging and accessible content with the aim to appeal to different audience groups and help convey our broader message. This included factsheets on each of the animals and educational posts showing how banknotes have evolved over time, as well as some more fun posts.

Alongside the formal consultation, we also visited schools and ran a design challenge for children across the country to give young people a voice in shaping our next generation of banknotes. And we held a number of in-person Youth and Citizens’ panels in communities including Llandudno and Devon. These were a great opportunity for the Bank to learn directly from people about the role that cash continues to play in society as well as their views on the shortlisted wildlife.

Conclusion 

Trust in banknotes begins with secure design but only endures if banknotes are available and recognised. Keeping banknotes trusted and relevant requires innovation and strong collaboration across the whole of the cash industry. And this must be coupled with communication and engagement to enable businesses and the public to understand, recognise and trust the banknotes they use. 

Our recent consultation gave people a voice, helping them connect with the banknotes they use and have a meaningful say about their future design. There will now be a quieter period in our communications about the next series, while our design work continues in the background, with security at its heart. Like the hedgehog emerging after its winter retreat, we will return when we are ready to unveil the first denomination.  

I would like to thank Elijah Lee, Zahra Damji, Nick McLaren, Ellen Caswell, Stuart Cooper, Lauren Murphy, Kiran Keer, Millie Rettie and Lisa Young.