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have you got an old 20 or 50 pound note
in your wallet you might not know that
after september 30th it will no longer
be legal tender in the uk so we're here
at the bank of england to ask the chief
cashier sarah john what you should do
with your old notes you've got until the
end of september to use them so if
you've got any at home dig them out
either take them to the shops and spend
them put them in your bank account after
the end of september they won't be legal
tender anymore we've obviously moved now
largely to the polymer notes which are
cleaner safer and stronger on the
50-pound note we've got the amazing
mathematician alan turing i think he was
a very very popular public choice
actually both for his work during the
war at bletchley park code breaking but
also his foundational work on computing
really the founder of modern day
computing and on the 20 pound note we've
got the famous artist jmw turner
fantastic seascapes in particular that
he's famous for
so there are six billion pounds worth of
the paper 20 is still in circulation and
8 billion pounds worth of the 50 still
out there the latest data is that 1.2
million people in the uk rely basically
completely on cash for their day-to-day
payments and a lot of people like to use
cash it's very tangible it's a good
budgeting tool i think a lot of 50 pound
notes people actually have as what we
call a store of value so they take them
out and have them as a little nest egg
at home we've dealt with a case very
recently where there were a number of
banknotes issued during the second world
war and what we think has happened is
that a storekeeper put them in a box and
put them in the back room of their shop
underneath the floorboards probably for
safekeeping and the shop was being
renovated a couple of years ago and when
they dug up the floor they found these
old one pound notes but they got sent in
to us it took the team a long time to
count them but there was somewhere
between 20 and 30 000 pounds worth of
banknotes there those bank notes will
always be worth their face value to us
at the bank of england so there are
options
most uk banks will accept them still
after the 30th september as a deposit
into a uk bank account or you can do a
postal exchange with us at the bank of
england if you go onto our website all
the details of how to do that are on
there
