The use of cheques is declining rapidly as cards of all types take over but we do still get a lot of enquiries from people complaining about the difficulty of using a standard cheque book if you are left-handed. The problem is that the binding is normally on the left and it is difficult to hold the cover open and write left-handed at the same time without a lot of contortion. It is even harder to write anything on the cheque stubbs as your hand is sitting on top of the binding and it gets more difficult as you get further through the book and the binding is thicker and thicker!

We ran a campaign on this many years ago to try to get the banks to produce a left-handed version of their cheque books, with the binding on the right. We did have some success and some of the banks did actually produce left-handed cheque books! The position has changed over the years so we have just done a bit of research and come up with the following:

The following UK banks and Building Societies have been reported as having left handed cheque books available if requested (we think only for personal accounts, not business accounts):HSBC

Barclays

Royal Bank of Scotland

Alliance and Leicester

NatWest

Barclays Royal Bank of Scotland Alliance and Leicester NatWest American banks apparently have “duplicate” cheques with each check backed with a no-carbon counterfoil so you automatically get a copy of the cheque as you write it. The perforation is along the top so there is not really a “right-handed/left-handed” issue.

Apparently it is standard in France to have cheque books with perforations along the top as well.

If you know any more about this or know of other institutions that produce left-handed cheque books please add them as comments below.