Bank of England releases new £10 note across UK
The Bank of England announced the release of the new £10 note featuring the novelist Jane Austen across the UK as the second in its new series of polymer notes.
The new tenner entered circulation on Thursday to replace the paper version featuring a portrait of naturalist Charles Darwin and features polymer with raised dots to help the blind and partially sighted differentiate between denominations.
Darwin notes will still be accepted in shops until spring 2018, with the exact date of withdrawal to be published three months in advance.
Just over one billion polymer £10 notes have been printed ready for issue, the Bank said, with first ATM machines loaded with the new stock on Thursday in 11 cities, with the notes circulated around the country and entering general circulation in coming days and weeks.
The 11 initial locations are Bath, Basingstoke, Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Swindon and Winchester.
BoE Governor Mark Carney said: “Our banknotes serve as repositories of the country’s collective memory, promoting awareness of the United Kingdom’s glorious history and highlighting the contributions of its greatest citizens.
"The new £10 note celebrates Jane Austen’s work. Austen’s novels have a universal appeal and speak as powerfully today as they did when they were first published."
As well as containing new security features to make them very difficult to counterfeit, the new £10 notes are also expected to last at least two and a half times longer than the current paper notes – around 5 years – and stay in better condition during day to day use.
Polymer £10 notes will have a series of raised dots in the top left-hand corner to enable tactile identification of the denomination of the note, as well as other means of differentiation for the visually impaired such as sizing, raised numerals and print and differing colour palettes.
The release of the polymer £5 in September last year led to a frenzy of excitement about how much the new notes could be worth to collectors.
Some of the plastic fivers were worth thousands of pounds – with auctioneers Spink & Sons drumming up £4,150 for a note with the serial number AA01 000017.
"Suddenly cash machines felt like lottery machines, with an outside chance that instead of furnishing you with a fiver, they could deliver an asset worth a small fortune," said Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
"However, in the vast majority of cases, a feverish checking of the relevant numbers revealed that each brand new Polymer note was worth exactly £5. As the note-checking kicks off again in earnest this week, there will be just as many disappointments lying in store."
For investment purposes, cash offers little return with interest rates at historic lows and inflation eroding the value of cash, with the stock market the most popular means of generating an inflation-beating return.
“Anyone who has had their money sitting in cash over this period would have struggled to make a real return on their savings," said Maike Currie, investment director for personal investing at Fidelity International.
"With inflation ticking upwards and little prospect of the Bank of England hiking interest rates any time soon, the stock market continues to be your best chance of generating a real return."
She provided a calculation showing that if someone had invested £15,000 into the FTSE All Share index five years ago, they would now be left with £24,549.
"If, however, you had invested £15,000 into the average UK savings account over the same period, you would be left with a paltry £15,123. That’s a difference of £9,426, which at a time of squeezed incomes, no saver can afford to ignore."