Credit card spending tops cash

SPENDING on plastic finally overtook cash spending in Britain today. At 10.38 am, in the huge Tesco stores in London's on Cromwell Road, schoolteacher Helen Carroll from Portsmouth signed her card for her grocery bill, taking the total spent on credit and debit cards ahead of cash transactions for the first time ever.

The UK payments association, Apacs, today said it had calculated that by the end of Friday a total of £269bn will have been charged on cards in Britain against cash spending of £268m.

Carroll was born in June 1966, the very month the first credit card - the Barclaycard - was introduced in this country.

Her transaction today was an old-fashioned signature on a print-out rather than the new chip and Pin system, as Apacs was keen to stress that contrary to folklore there is no 1 January cut-off for using signature-based cards.

{1}There are more than 130m plastic cards in use in Britain with two-thirds of the spending on them accounted for by debit cards and the remainder on credit cards.

Jemma Smith of Apacs said: 'When the first plastic cards appeared in Britain in June 1966 only a handful of retailers accepted them and there were very few customers.

'But in less than 40 years, plastic has become the most popular way to pay due to the added security and flexibility it offers.

'The key driver has been the introduction of the debit card, which now accounts for two-thirds of plastic transactions and is used by millions every day.'