First new £1 coin design to circulate since 2017 features bees: are these collectables of the future?

Britons will find new £1 coins featuring King Charles III in their change this week, in a move likely to excite numismatists.

The coin, which comes into circulation today, the Royal Mint says, features bees. It is one of eight new coins unveiled in October last year as part of a collectors’ set featuring King Charles.

It is the first time since the introduction of the new dodecagonal coin that a £1 coin has been issued with a design other than the coin featuring the ‘nations of the crown’ on the reverse.

It is believed that approximately 750 million £1 coins were minted with this design.

This new bee design however has a mintage of 2.975 million. They were minted in November of last year, so they all have 2023 printed on them.

Whether more £1 coins will be released will depend on demand. Mintage figures for new coins will be announced later this year. In any case, there will be no more than 2.975 million coins in circulation with the year 2023 on them.

Last month, This is Money announced that The Royal Mint plans to stop producing new coins from December and instead focus on expanding its gold mining facility.

Gregory Edmund, senior specialist at auction house Spink & Son, said: ‘It is a surprise that the Royal Mint is issuing new coins at all, given that they announced last month that they would no longer be producing new coins from scratch.

“If they were to stick strictly to a 3 million circulation, that would be very unusual, given how low that circulation is.”

The number indicating the value of each of the new coins has increased since the last time a new £1 coin was issued in 2017.

According to the Royal Mint, this is intended to ‘help children understand the value of money’.

Cash payments are becoming a smaller part of all transactions. Cash use fell to 12 per cent of all payments last year – and UK Finance says 22 million adults are ‘mainly cashless’.

The data shows that 1.5 million adults used cash as their main method of spending last year, according to data from UK Finance. This is the first increase since 2019.

Edmund said: ‘The coins will be popular and generate general intrigue. With a mintage of 3 million, it will be one of the rarer £1 coins in circulation.

‘It shows that the winds of change are blowing. It may be a time when we don’t know how many more coins The Royal Mint will issue this year, so it could be worth collecting them.’

Could £1 coins be worth a coin in the future?

How popular a new coin will be with collectors depends on how many enter circulation.

The scarcer a coin is, the more collectible it is, as Mr. Edmund van Spink points out above.

To put it into context, one of the most sought after coins is the legendary 2009 50p Kew Gardens coin. Only 210,000 of these coins were minted and they sell for as much as £250 on eBay.

Almost 3 million new £1 coins will initially be released into circulation. A coin expert This is Money spoke to says they will be worth no more than face value.

In general, a premium is charged on coins in circulation that contain errors or mistakes, such as an incorrect date.

Phil Mussell, Managing Director of Token Publishing, said: “It is unlikely that these coins will be worth more than their face value in the future.

‘A standard coin is rarely of interest to collectors, because they become commonplace and eventually all the coins in our pockets will bear an image of King Charles III.

‘Granted, some people will put them straight on eBay and we think they could sell for £5 as collectors want them first, but these coins will not fetch more than that.’

A collector’s set of the unused coins is available to purchase from The Royal Mint website, starting at £33.

These coins in the collector’s set feature a mint master’s mark, a small crown on the obverse or a design with ‘heads’ next to the effigy of His Majesty. This distinguishes them from the coins that people receive as change today.

Rebecca Morgan, Director of Commemorative Coins at The Royal Mint, said: “The Royal Mint has struck the circulating coins of every British monarch since Alfred the Great and it is an honour to reveal that the King Charles III £1 coin is now in circulation.

‘We know there will be a buzz of excitement among collectors and the public to get this special piece of history in their change. We hope the designs of all denominations will spark important conversations about the conservation of these important species.’