Royal Mint to stop making coins from scratch after 1,100 years – staff to mine circuit boards for gold instead

The Royal Mint is planning to stop producing coins at its factory in Wales from December, with workers being used to mine gold from laptop circuit boards, This is Money has learned.

The Royal Mint is the oldest company in the UK and has been producing coins for over 1,100 years, but an insider has told us that this will soon come to an end.

Instead of producing its own coins from raw steel, the Mint now purchases ‘blank’ coins – plain disks that do not have the coin design struck on them – from abroad when supplies run out.

According to a source within the Royal Mint, the company will import the coins from countries including Germany and Turkey and have them printed at its own Llantrisant site, rather than making them from scratch.

At the same time, news has emerged that the Treasury has not placed any new orders for one and two pence coins with the Royal Mint this year, due to a decline in the use of cash.

The Royal Mint currently purchases steel, which workers in the factory roll to the correct thickness, press into plates and plate with copper or nickel.

But the company will no longer do this and is now looking to sell its facilities to produce blanks, This is Money understands.

“They have said they will no longer take overseas orders, but they will still supply the UK market,” the insider told This is Money.

‘But they don’t have the facilities to make their own coins. They are delivered from elsewhere and minted at the mint.’

This person wishes to remain anonymous because he/she is currently employed by the Royal Mint.

They told This is Money that the Royal Mint is to set up a ‘gold separation facility’ at the two factories where the raw coins were previously produced.

Employees who previously produced coins can now focus on breaking circuit boards as the Mint moves to extract gold from phones and laptops.

“They are slowly expanding the gold mining,” the insider said.

As part of the move to gold mining, 200 employees have been offered jobs at the gold recycling plant, avoiding layoffs.

However, the insider told This is Money that more than 120 staff have left the Mint as part of an early redundancy scheme, offering a full annual salary of up to £30,000.

Those who remain, they said, will work shorter shifts but will receive their full salaries through December.

They said the factories, ovens and presses that package and cut the coins will be closed.

“The only machines they have left to mint coins are the coin presses that they use to mint the coins,” he said.

Of the approximately 40 coin presses currently in use by the Royal Mint, only two or three are retained to produce coins when demand increases, to serve the British market.

According to the source, these coins will be on display at the museum located next to the Royal Mint in South Wales, where tourists can see how the coins are made.

There, commemorative coins are minted and prepared to produce coins that are put into circulation when needed.

“They are moving the commemorative coins to the presses in the Mint Experience, so the presses are still running there. If they need British coins, they will have to stamp them on those presses,” he added.

A spokesperson for the Royal Mint told This is Money: ‘We remain fully committed to the minting of British coins, which have been at the heart of The Royal Mint for 1,100 years.

‘We have the facilities and capacity to produce coins of all denominations when required and we continue to work closely with the Treasury to meet the demand from UK ATM centres.’

In April, the Mint announced that it will no longer produce coins from abroad, despite having done so for almost 700 years.

The decline in cash use is to blame

The Royal Mint is the oldest company in the United Kingdom and has been producing coins for over 1,100 years.

However, according to UK Finance, only 12 percent of transactions were made with cash last year, while a staggering 39 percent of the population lives largely cashless.

However, cash is still the most important means of payment for 2.6 percent of the population.

“It’s sad, it’s the way the world is going,” the source said. “People are using coins less and less. If people see the Royal Mint closing, they might start using coins again.

“Once the facilities are dismantled and gone, it will be very difficult to restart them.”

The Royal Mint’s currency arm posted a loss of £13.1m in 2022/23, up from £4.5m the year before. The source said Mint employees could expect to make a loss of £30m this year.

“None of us can understand how the loss could become so great,” the source said.

According to the source, the decision means that the Mint’s melting, rolling and stamping plant and its annealing, pickling and plating plant will both close by the end of this year.

This follows reports that the Treasury has not placed any new orders for one and two pence coins for the next few years, due to the increasing reliance on contactless payments across the country.

The Ministry of Finance has also determined that no new coins may be minted this year.