Growing number of firms now refuse to accept cash

More than three-quarters (76%) of people believe it is important to have the option to pay with cash and fourfifths (82%) think all shops should accept it, a survey has found.

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More than half (52%) of people said they had been somewhere during the previous two months that had not accepted or had discouraged the use of cash - and 56% said this was an inconvenience to them.

The research was commissioned by cash access and ATM network Link.

It found that contactless via cards was the most preferred payment method among people surveyed, with 40% choosing this option.

But nearly two-thirds (65%) of people said that physical coins and banknotes gave them confidence that "nothing would go wrong", such as a payment outage.