I’m in London and nowhere will accept NI sterling.

[EleanorLavish]

It’s so annoying!
DH just went to the post office to change it to English sterling and they refused it, said it was ‘policy’.
TBF I said rob DH to either put it in the bank or change it when we were in NI and he said it would be fine.
Is it the same with Scottish Sterling?

That is v v annoying and daft. That said, I always try to spend mine before I return. I once saw a bus driver lay into a tourist for trying to pay with a £50 note. Really shocking, she was straight off the stanstead express and I doubt he would have done it to a man, but it does show nowhere has to accept anything.

Went to Norway once, didn’t notice the bureau de change had given me a note worth £300. Try spending that bugger!

The self service machine in Asda takes NI money, I was surprised and pleased to discover.

My local waitrose accepts Scottish notes but not NI ones.
After I explained to manager that the notes have the same (dubious) status in England, he agreed to accept my NI notes

Self service machine in Tesco also takes them. I'm from NI but live in Manchester and often go in to buy whatever is cheapest just to get English notes back from the machine.

Large shops generally take Bank of Scotland/RBS notes but Clyde's Dale are harder to get rid of and NI harder still (I'd never seen a NI note in my life until I went there.) Guernsey notes also rejected. Pop into a bank (not at lunchtime) and they should swap them for you.

There;s a lot of ignorance around. Those of us in Scotland or Northern Ireland are used to our colourful notes and the fact there are different notes from different banks. We cope fine with all of it. I would happily accept a Northern Irish note in a shop but probably wouldn't hand it back out in change.

No shops DON'T have to take anyone's money if they don't want to but what grinds our gears is the attitude. Some shop assistant looking at you as if you're a master criminal forger because they haven;t been trained about what notes they can accept. So then they scream across the shop "Oi Sandra! Can we take "this"? wafting the note around with a faint look of disgust. Sandra trots over, the pair of them pore over the note for a bit while everyone else in the queue wonders what's going on. It's irritating and winds me up no end.

OP - if there's a Nat West or Royal Bank of Scotland go there and ask them to swap your notes. They own Ulsterbank too and should at least know what they are.

The thing is that in many places in England you almost never see a Scottish or Irish note. I don’t think I’ve seen one in well over twenty years.
If I was presented with one as either a customer or cashier I would have no idea if it was real or not.

I used to always enjoy the conversations with various shopkeepers and cashiers about it and usually most places accepted NI notes. Stupidest person I've ever discussed it with looked at it carefully and said, "I'm just trying to remember if it's the Northern or the Southern Irish money we can accept".

A related incident in a branch of Safeway once (that dates me!) where the cashier tried to refuse the customer's "Scottish coin". That coin being a pound coin which obviously comes in a variety of designs. This one happened to have a Scottish thistle on it. Called the manager over who gave her short shrift.

I've only rarely had issues changing Scottish money, usually it's fine. I live in the north - is this a London thing?

It's really annoying - I find M&S is normally a good bet for taking them. But I try and avoid taking too many back with me from NI to London.

As an aside, the local RBS branch near me in Glasgow has two cash machines side by side, one of which is always filled with Bank of England notes.

Went to Norway once, didn’t notice the bureau de change had given me a note worth £300

Must have been a terrible exchange rate - 1000 NOK is the largest note issued and is currently worth about £90.

Have we debunked the "shops have to take them" myth once and for all.

The insistent really need to check their false assertions before making themselves look foolish.

It's really not hard to see that shops aren't going to want to take notes that they can't be sure are genuine. Lots of shops near me won't take a £50 simply because there are many forgeries and they don't have a reliable way to check them.

No they don't have to take them.

But there are ways of not taking them which are polite, non-offensive and don't make the person handing the note over feel like a criminal.

We accepted Scottish and Irish notes until recently there was a spate of fake ones. The bank told us we could refuse to accept any notes. We got a UV torch to check any suspicious notes so accept anything that passes the test now. The fake notes before were coated in something so passed the pen test but not UV

I work in a large pub and we take Scottish money, we see it quite a lot, but we have been told by the managers that we have to refuse NI money.
I think it is because it's hard to tell if it's counterfeit.

just keep it in the back of your purse until you go back if you are back and forth all the time

my ILs would live in fear of having any "forrin" notes when they would go home to Dorset, used to drive me batty.

In all my days I have only had one shop refuse a scottish tenner and someone in the queue actually piped up "it's perfectly legal tender" just like in the Billy Connolly skit :o

Dh thought he was in for some trouble in a garage in Yeovil paying for petrol years back, as the guy exclaimed "ooooi, Scottish notes" but it turned out that the Scottish notes had some sort of special security measure that he had been dying to see with his new fancy find-a-fraud note checking light :o

When I worked retail we had a 10 minute "training session" in how to spot fake notes. We briefly covered scottish notes but we saw them so rarely that I would have never remembered what to check for. A bank of England tenner was handed over so often that you could tell almost instantly if you had a fake unless it was a very good one. I'm betting the same is true in Scotland and N Ireland for their notes, you just get used to them.

The person up thread that mentioned Guernsey notes... these are not legal within the UK. They're pound sterling but the notes need exchanging in a bank.

The store I work at will accept £50 notes, Scottish notes but not NI. I was told it was because there are so many fake NI notes

Afaik they can not refuse it.

Oh yes they can!

Could you pay the notes into your bank account then, depending on how cheeky you're feeling, immediately take the same amount out over the counter or use the cashpoint? I know you can do this with the old style of BoE notes so can't see why you shouldn't be able to do the same.