Royal Mint to stop minting coins for other countries thanks to decline in cash use - what a shame, says LEE BOYCE

Seven years ago, I visited the Royal Mint in Llantrisant, Wales to watch how coins are created.

This included: the start, when a design is fleshed out; the middle, when they’re pickled; and end, when coins are spat out via huge machines in perfect, satisfying unity.

It’s a precise art and the Mint is a huge employer in this part of the Welsh valleys, having moved to its current site from London in the 1960s.

While I was there, the Mint was proud to highlight it had produced coins for 60 different countries over the decades, from Jamaica to Iceland, Suriname to Thailand.

Art form: The designing and minting of coins is an art form – and the Royal Mint have long been the global masters at it

That is a tradition that goes back nearly 700 years to 1325. That’s when Edward II was king, England had a population just a nudge over 4million and minting of coins was undertaken in the Tower of London.

In 1325, coins were shipped to Bordeaux for use in the king’s territories in South West France.

The Royal Mint itself has origins that date back to 886. That’s quite a few generations of expertise in the art of making uniform coins of all sorts of shapes and sizes, for countries big and small.

It says on its website: ‘For many years the Royal Mint has been the world’s leading export mint.

‘In a typical year, coins may be produced for 60 or more different countries, some of which have no mint of their own, while others may have a mint that is temporarily unable to cope with demand.’

In 1922 a ‘new and energetic’ Deputy Master led to a huge increase in its export business, the Mint says.

Now, 102 years later, This is Money revealed the Royal Mint is to no longer make overseas coins.

As a bit of a coin geek (I’m no collector, but I do enjoy the beauty of currency) it feels like a huge shame.

Instead, the Royal Mint is to focus its attention on recovering gold from electronics – it’s looking to extract it out of old laptops and mobile phones – taking advantage of the surge in precious metal prices.

“As a bit of a coin geek (I’m no collector, but I do enjoy the beauty of currency) it feels like a huge shame.”

Indeed, it has become a big player in the world of gold with its bullion arm, where buyers can snap up sets worth more than £200,000 with a few clicks of a mouse.

The move boils down to two things. Firstly, profitability. Its currency arm loses money and in 2022/23 these losses were up 191 per cent to £13.1million.

Secondly, demand for physical currency globally is on the wane. In a nutshell, people across the world are more connected than ever before to payment systems that are not as ‘archaic’ as trading coins for goods and services, a system used for millennia.

The Royal Mint told us it will no longer bid for contracts to make international circulating coins and will stop production when it fulfils its existing orders in December.

A spokesman added: ‘The decline of cash use globally has been a catalyst for change at the Royal Mint.’

The shift to card and contactless technology in the past decade has been rapid – not just in Britain, but in all sorts of remote pockets of the world. This is yet a further sign of it.

It says there will be no job losses, and affected staff will be offered roles at its ramped-up recycling centre.

Focus shift: The Royal Mint will concentrate on extracting gold out of electronic devices

But Labour MP for Pontypridd, Alex Davies-Jones, said of our story in a tweet: ‘The Royal Mint plays a crucial role in our local economy – no jobs currently at risk but does raise concerns about long-term security and could also diminish our role in coin circulation and damage our global soft power.

‘I’ll be monitoring this closely.’

I may be a little old school: I like carrying physical money in my wallet and when I go abroad, I always take currency with me.

I don’t use cash exclusively, and card payments have their place, but physical money is still crucial in my view.

Technology can fail, signal is often patchy to make payments, it’s harder to budget and cash gives me the ability to make purchases without my bank knowing what I’m spending it on. A small victory in a world where we’re increasingly tracked, our information a commodity.

A while back, I went to my daughter’s primary school to learn about how they’re teaching maths, to help match up at home.

There was a section about learning to count coins, and one teacher said something along the lines of: ‘although, that doesn’t seem that relevant anymore. When children play shops now, most of them pretend to tap a card, learned behaviour…’

I left a note in the feedback form saying: ‘Please keep teaching children about coins and notes. It’s vitally important.’

The Mint is keen to stress that it will keep making UK currency, but with usage here dwindling too – it’ll be down to shoppers to maintain the demand, and thus supply, and parents to teach their children about physical cash.

For instance, for my daughter’s 5th birthday, I took her to a toy shop with £100 cash – and taught her how to budget, showing what it would allow her to buy, and she was fascinated.

But all of the above stokes fears in me physical cash is going to go the way of the dodo – and then, we’ll all be in a pickle.