In England and Wales the networks of the big four banks plus The Royal Bank of Scotland, Abbey National, Halifax and Yorkshire banks were examined and in Scotland Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale, Lloyds TSB and Royal. Where non competing branches of Lloyds TSB and of Royal/NatWest still exist within the same “centre”, following the mergers, the second branch has been excluded from the analysis. The approach duplicates that used by at least one major bank and is endorsed by others, although the BBA claims not to collect industry wide data.

Separate results were obtained for each country.

The commercially supplied database of branch networks was tested against other published sources but all contained some errors and omissions mainly due to incomplete or delayed reporting by the banks concerned. However, these are not considered material to the overall results which, in the case of at least one bank is understated by 10/15%.

Business Geographics’ definition (adjusted) of urban and rural areas was used to classify the data but the urban category contains some discrete communities, especially “urban villages” because of proximity to larger settlements.

Each sole/dual bank “centre” has been allocated to a mileage band representing the distance to the next nearest bank branch “as the crow flies”; road distances would be longer and in some cases much longer in both urban and rural areas.