LONDON • While the economic turmoil wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has left some people in Britain counting every penny, the country's central bank is apparently having trouble keeping track of billions of pounds.

A parliamentary report released on Friday said that £50 billion (S$89.7 billion) of paper money is "missing" from the country's cash supply and that the Bank of England "seems to lack curiosity" about where it has all gone.

Of the more than £70 billion worth of bills in circulation in Britain, the report found that only about a quarter was being spent in stores and on other purchases. That leaves the majority of those bills - which by design are not traceable - unaccounted for.

The £50 billion in cash may be hidden away in unreported household savings, squirrelled away for a rainy day or is being used for more nefarious purposes, Parliament's Public Accounts Committee said in the report, calling on the Bank of England to investigate.

"£50 billion of sterling notes - or about three-quarters of this precious and dwindling supply - is stashed somewhere but the Bank of England doesn't know where, who by or what for - and doesn't seem very curious," said Ms Meg Hillier, the lawmaker for the Hackney South and Shoreditch areas of London and chair of the committee that produced the report.

The Bank of England hit back at the suggestion that it was taking a laissez-faire approach to the issue.

"It is the responsibility of the Bank of England to meet public demand for bank notes. The Bank has always met that demand and will continue to do so," a spokesman from the central bank said in a statement on Friday.

Ms Hillier said in an interview that the gap between notes in circulation and those actually being used "must be linked to crime".

"Are more of us putting money under the mattress because of Covid? It would have to be a lot of us doing that," she said.

The parliamentary committee hopes an investigation by the Bank of England may shed some light - if not on where it is being held, then at least on the factors behind the increase in demand for cash.

The bank said the amount of paper money being used for transactions in Britain - around 20 per cent to 25 per cent of all cash in circulation - is broadly in line with other major economies.

NYTIMES