For those of you following alternative currencies, you have likely come across the Brixton pound. It features the handsome visage of Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie, I believe the only currency to do so. There are also local pounds turning up in places like Totnes, Stroud and Lewes.
The game may be changed as another local currency is set to come on line, this time in the much more substantial city of Bristol.
The schemes is to be administered by the Bristol Credit Union, with whom consumers will have to open an account. This means that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) will underpin the whole scheme and ensure that it will have the same protection as any other deposit account – government protection of up to £85,000 per customer – even though the currency is not actually legal tender.
The equivalent of all the Bristol Pounds in circulation will be held by the Bristol Credit Union as backing for the currency.
The money can either be cashed for notes or used electronically to pay bills online or even with a mobile phone – and since it has the backing of Bristol City Council it can even be used to pay local business taxes, so people are hardly going to need to be worried about being stuck with a large balance in local currency which they cannot use.
‘This will be money created by the people of Bristol for the Bristol people’ said Ciaran Mundy, the director of the Bristol Pound.
What this eventual may bring us back to is the city-state model – a model we saw resurging in the STEEP Report series that Competitive Futures did back in 2007. As complex management of the nation-state fails, people will fall back on the trust horizon to much more local transactions. A local currency helps solidify this tendency.
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