Hello and welcome to The Rondown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're looking at how access to cash and plans for a central bank digital currency, known as a CBDC, have fuelled new privacy concerns.

My guests are the Tory MP Marcus Fish, who chairs the All-Party

Parliamentary Group on CBDCs, and Silky Carlo, director of the campaign group Big Brother Watch,

and making his podcast debut as my colleague and Polhome political reporter Tom Scottson.

So I'm going to start with you, Tom. Have you been writing about CBDCs for us on Polaro?

Just first of all, explain what they are and kind of how they came about. So a CBDC, a central bank digital currency,

so if it's going to be introduced, is a new former sterling, which it would be provided

and supplied by the Bank of England. So it would mark quite a big shift away from how money works in the current

system. So a lot of the time now what happens is that we have access and we work with retail banks.

So if you think about banks obviously on the high street, you're Nat West, you Santander.

This kind of cuts out that middleman, that big chain and it makes the citizen, the person,

with the access to the central banks of the Bank

of England. And I think the big difference is, and I think the reason that it's kind of come in

to the conversation more recently and what we've seen is that obviously cryptocurrencies have

the last five, ten years have started to really come up in prevalence, more people are using them,

particularly in the West, and all over the world, of course.

And what's happened now, I think, with central banks is they've seen these crypto assets,

these cryptocurrencies. And of course, what's happened there is they are never being very

volatile. Of course, they work in markets that are more unregulated as such. And of course,

therefore, this is more private money. This is away from the state

issuing money. I think what happens now is what central banks have seen with CBDCs, if they thought,

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