New UK 5 Pound Note Out In September With Pics

@NumisRob
Thanks for the explanation and clarification!

The IBNS discussion board has an interesting post about these. Apparently, the BoE has kept much of the AA01 block to itself. People who lined up at the bank on the first day were receiving other blocks. The lowest number available will be AA01 000017 which is being auctioned off for charity. AA01 000001 went to the Queen and the other lower numbers were apparently reserved for other such dignitaries.

Even the chief cashier whose signature is on the notes was in the queue to get new notes at one point.

May 2017 is early to be making them not legal tender. How many people go abroad and come back a year later, like I will do, only to find they can't even use the banknote. I'm hoping I don't have too many. Though not a worry as you can go to the bank, just a little annoying.

Actually banknote news says Bank of England ordered 440 million of the new 5 pound polymer note.

Banknotes news does not provide a source other than saying
Courtesy of Antje Bird. I cannot find the source on the Antje Bird website.
https://minoa.li/

The Bank of England website seems to indicate that they ordered 477 million banknotes over a two year period, but unlike the BEP in the USA, the BoE does not report detailed production numbers by series.

Production of Bank of England banknotes (Millions of notes) 
 	£5	£10	£20	£50	Total
2014/15	221	210	340	72	843
2015/16	256	274	144	0	674

There are no paper £5 notes with Victoria Cleland's signature:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publ...015/031.aspx

At current rates of exchange 20GBP=217SEK. If UK were to follow through with their plan to eliminate to the £50 banknote one way would be to replace the present mix of 2,052 million £20 notes and 263 million £50 notes with 2,710 million polymer banknotes of £20 value. As the actual transfer won't happen for several years, the numbers will be higher.

The value of all four denominations of GBP banknotes is £63,601 million or roughly £1000 per capita if you include coins.

But even if the British radically beat the Swedes by having the largest banknote worth roughly 200SEK (while the 500SEK and 1000SEK banknotes are still in circulation) the total value of banknotes and coin relative to GDP is still much higher. The £5 and £10 banknotes plus coins are worth £221 per capita, while the GDP is £28,700 per capita. So the small notes and coins are worth about .8% of GDP.

So the big question would be would the Bank of England not only remove the £50 banknote, but following Sweden's lead not replace them with an equivalent amount of smaller denominations.

Remember that the Bank of Canada made the promise to supply a sufficient number of smaller denomination banknotes when they removed the CAD$1000 banknote in the year 2000. Of course, it was a fairly easy promise to make for the Bank of Canada to make since the amount of money circulating in the $1000 banknote was under CAD$4 billion, whereas for UK the amount is £13 billion in the largest banknote.

To clarify redlock's statement the Central Banks seem to be obfuscating the number of banknotes produced and the number of banknotes issued. The Bank of England has a table of banknotes issued, but they may have produced a lot more.

Value of banknotes issued (£ millions)
Each year we issue new banknotes to replace unfit ones and to meet any increases in overall demand. The value of each denomination issued are shown in the table below.

          £5	£10	£20	£50	Total
2013/14	  793	2,141	5,281	2,260	10,474
2014/15	  869	2,433	6,202	2,165	11,668
2015/16	  977	5,683	5,056	1,831	13,547
2016/17	1,643	4,008	6,382	3,188	15,220
2017/18	  386	8,192	3,291	2,169	14,039
2018/19	  154	3,568	1,211	1,616	 6,549
2019/20	  226	3,002	5,198	  369	 8,795

The US seems to be very clear (unless they are having problems) about production numbers, but they don't release statistics about number issued. For example, the 2009 color $100 banknotes are listed as 1,440,000,000 produced but they had serious flaws in them and were held back until better machinery could be developed to remove the flawed notes. To this day they have never released how many of these notes were actually issued.

Sweden consider production quantities (actually order quantities) as a state secret, so we don't know how many 1000SEK banknotes were actually ordered. They only distribute a tiny number of these notes, so nobody knows if they have a warehouse full of 1000SEK notes if the economy were to tank.

Sweden circulation number in millions of SEK
3,128 kr --- coins (1kr, 2kr, 5kr and 10kr)
41,869 kr --- 500kr notes (worth US$55.88 apiece) for ATMs
12,044 kr --- 20kr, 50kr, 100kr, 200kr, 1000kr banknotes
5,493 kr --- Invalid banknotes which can still be turned in to the Central Bank, but are not legal tender in stores.

Norges bank ordered 24.4 million new 1000NKK banknotes in 2019 (launched on 14 November 2019) to replace the 11.5923 million 1000NKK banknotes in circulation at the end of 2019. So we have good evidence that Norges will still be supporting this denomination for the next decade at least.

It is not clear how cashlessness will come about (if ever). South Korea has declared coins will no longer be legal tender at some date, with the possibility that notes may not be legal tender at some date in the future.

Sweden will probably wait until they issue the e-krona, and also the invalid banknotes have reached their expiration date. They could stop production of all but the 500kr banknote so foreigners, or people who are stuffing money under a mattress, and the inflexible can still get cash from ATMS. But change can only be provided on phone apps or cards or deposited into bank accounts with SWISH.