Councils to hold joint meeting to discuss banking hub for Biggleswade and beyond
Options for a banking hub to serve Biggleswade and its surrounding area are to be weighed up at a meeting of local authorities to discuss the impact of declining bank facilities on residents.
Members of Biggleswade Town Council are arranging a meeting with neighbouring councils, including Sandy and Ampthill, according to a report to Central Bedfordshire Council’s Biggleswade joint committee.
They want to explore options for a banking hub serving the town and the ‘wider locality’, said the report.
The conclusions reached by these authorities will be presented to the joint committee, “setting out key findings and how it might act as an appropriate forum to support and progress initiatives aimed at addressing the lack of local banking facilities”.
This would include the potential development of a banking hub in Biggleswade, explained the report.
BTC’s head of governance and strategic partnerships Karim Hosseini told a joint committee meeting: “Officers are compiling a register on vacant shop units, in keeping with the regulated national legislation.
“It may be in due course some of those shop units are eligible for that kind of legislation to be enacted in its various forms,” he said. “We’ll see what happens whether any of those result in a potential banking hub or an improved Post Office option.”
Conservative Biggleswade East councillor Grant Fage, who chairs the joint committee, added: “There’s a full audit of areas which would benefit from a banking hub being done and an audit of current banking facilities across Central Bedfordshire, which is progressing along with the Local Plan.
“There was a resolution on this at a full council meeting about 18 months ago. Work has begun in the background at CBC, which isn’t public yet. But hopefully it can complement this commitment being made by the town council.”
BTC’s town centre management committee was warned in November it would have to “fight” to achieve the local authority’s banking hub ambitions. The closure of Lloyds Bank in High Street left Biggleswade without front-line banking services.
Sandy Town Council agreed to support and collaborate with BTC in February in any application for a banking hub to serve the two communities. It would prefer to request that a hub operates across two sites, one in Sandy and the other in Biggleswade.