Leader: Why cash will be weighing us down for years

The cashless society is a bit like the paperless office. It's always about five years away.

This time it's the turn of Visa Europe's chief executive to predict cash will be extinct by 2012.

And sure, in the last decade alternatives to cash have made big leaps forward - with the broad adoption of credit and debit cards and other payment methods such as PayPal coming along too. And now rather than hand over some cash or write a cheque it is possible to make a purchase by tapping a teller's till with your wallet or mobile phone using contactless and near field communications (NFC) payments.

There's also no doubt cheques and postal orders are slowly getting consigned to the history books as society gets ever more reliant on fantastic plastic - but could cash really be done for so soon?

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It's going to take a longer time for the average consumer to lose their love of cold hard cash. It's been around for a few thousand years now and it will probably take more than five years to clear the notes and coins from our pockets.

Cash does its job well, especially in terms of making small payments. And whereas shrapnel is anonymous, e-payments make tracking spending habits much easier - something not everyone likes.

In a few decades' - not years' - time, e-payments could perhaps be the norm and bank notes relegated to dusty museums.

But perhaps a bigger danger is that as criminals develop more high-tech ways to scam society, consumers retreat from their electronic payments methods and favour the old fashioned folding stuff that fits in the pocket. After all, nobody's ever managed to crash a £20 note.