Cheques get the chop at Asda

The death of the cheque came a step closer yesterday, with the announcement that supermarket Asda is to stop accepting them as payment in some of its branches.

The retailer is trialling a cash and plastic-only policy at 21 stores within the M25 in a move it says could help reduce queuing times at the tills.

Customers in Asda's pilot area may use their cheque books for the next three weeks only if they have no other way of paying.

A cash or plastic-only policy will be in place at those stores for the subsequent eight weeks, after which Asda will evaluate the trial.

The volume of cheques used in Asda has more than halved over the past five years.

A spokesman said: "The idea behind it is to see whether it speeds up time at the check-out. Cheques do take time and we know queues are a bugbear. Paying by cheque is more time consuming than by card or cash."

According to Apacs, the body representing banks and credit card companies, cheques now account for only 6% of retail spending compared to 60% for debit and credit cards.

Its most recent figures show that 6m cheques a day were issued in the UK in 2004 compared to 22.8m credit and debit card transactions.

The peak for cheque usage was in 1990 when 11m per day were issued in the UK, Apacs said.

It predicts that cheques will dwindle to 3.5m per day by 2014.

Apacs' head of public relations, Jemma Smith, said: "There is a generation of people who have grown up without having a cheque book around. We have moved away from cheques and cash and are increasingly turning to plastic, particularly our debit cards."

A British Retail Consortium spokeswoman said: "Chequebook transactions have been steadily declining for many years and have now reduced in many stores to negligible proportions.

"They are the most time-consuming payment method at the till. Cheques need to be written, they need to be validated by a bankers card, details need to be written on the back and they can get lost.

"In addition, chequebook fraud has been an ongoing problem."

Petrol giant Shell stopped accepting cheques at its 586 forecourts in the UK on September 5, saying the move was "in line with the general trend within the retail sector".

Tesco said the chain was still accepting cheques and had no plans to stop doing so in the foreseeable future.