Small change for euro coins

Date: 20/03/1997

SO IT'S back to the drawing-board then, for the technical wizards who thought they had created the perfect set of euro coins.

They have spent three years working at it; three hard years of doodling with set squares and compasses and propelling pencils - and what thanks do they get? None, none at all.

All that happened when EU finance ministers met earlier this week was a lot of bickering about problems with vending machines, including some unmentionable incompatibility problems, apparently, with a certain sort of vending machine you find in gents' toilets in Denmark.

This is the kind of non-harmonisation which will scupper us all, eventually. Never mind convergence criteria and deficit targets - what hope have we got of achieving a single currency if everyone has double standards?

These people can't even agree on whether or not the nickel content of the average pool of loose change in your pocket is a health hazard.

It is, insisted Sweden's Finance Minister Erik Asbrink. It most definitely isn't, insisted the others.

Look, said one non-Swedish official, we have had nickel in coins in Europe for centuries. Where are all these allergy victims then? Why have we not heard about this before?

You have, said the Swedes, you just don't listen. Then Erik passed round a real Swedish coin containing what they call Nordic gold. Look at that, he said proudly, and even in the grey light of the Council of Ministers' meeting chamber it glinted like the 24-carat real thing, although it actually contains alloys and tin.

The uncharitable view is that the Swedes are just pretty keen to make a financial killing by replacing nickel in billions of new coins in the EU with their Nordic gold.

The nice thing about Nordic gold, from a Swedish point of view, is that the Swedes are the only ones with a licence to produce the stuff. A nice little earner for the Stockholm treasury.

Irish Finance Minister Ruairi Quinn simply did not believe that nickel allergies existed. How come only the Swedes suffer from this complaint, he wanted to know.

And, indeed, it is amazing that a quarter of Swedish women get rashes from nickel, according to “eminent research” conducted in Sweden. Perhaps Swedish men are not allowed to carry coins.

But the Swedes are not the only ones determined to prove that harmonisation is an increasingly difficult trick to pull off when you have more than about six member states.

Take the Germans. Nobody thought to tell the euro-coin technical team that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is big in coin collecting, as well as everything else.

And the word at the Council of Ministers this week was that Helmut does not like polygonal coins. They are not attractive enough. It's got something to do with the lack of symmetry of a fundamentally round object which is flattened out to give it an uneven number of sides, apparently.

The technicians have proposed eight coins, only one of which would be multi-sided, to make for easy identification by the blind and partially sighted. Never mind the blind and partially sighted, said German Finance Minister Theo Waigel - although naturally not in those words - what about the problems for our vending-machine industry of converting its equipment to recognise these unattractive unsymmetrical things?

There are, so it is said, 30 million machines swallowing our cash across 15 member states. But the Germans, of course, have more than anyone else, and adapting them to accept knobbly coins as well as round ones would just make the cost and inconvenience unacceptable.

One compromise, suggested someone, might be to keep the knobbly shape to help the blind, but at least have an even number of sides, as a nod in the direction of German aesthetic sensibilities.

Enter the all-knowing Patrick Child, spokesman for European Commissioner Yves-Thibault 'single currency' de Silguy.

If I understood him correctly, he explained that the problem with an even number of sides is that a vending machine which is scanning incoming coins may mistake the multi-sided one for a round one because its laser scanner thing may be tricked into identifying what it believes is a uniform diameter; whereas with a coin with an uneven number of sides, the electronics in a vending machine have a far better chance of noticing that the thing has a non-uniform diameter as they scan across from one smooth side to a corner, and so on.

Is all that clear? Good. So a nine-sided coin it is, then, unless you want seven-sided?

No no, said Waigel, we want a coin with no sides whatsoever. Just a nice round, flat thing like all the others.

The Germans are peeved, too, because the final proposals do not include the kind of metal-sandwich coins they want so badly. Why do they want them? Could it be because the Germans alone have the technology to produce these coins in huge bulk and would make enough of a financial killing to meet the Maastricht economic criteria?

The British, who are still mourning the loss of the threepenny bit, which had eight sides in the days when the notion of a vending machine spotting the difference was as remote as flying to the moon, could not see what all the fuss was about.

Even the Swedes do not care what shape the damned thing is. As long as it does not contain any nickel.

Only four of the new coins are supposed to contain any nickel anyway, pleaded the Commission. Can we get on with this please?

But no, we could not. While the Dutch EU presidency expressed full confidence in the German and French convergence programmes, refusing to countenance the possibility of failure to reach agreed economic criteria,

the same could not be said of everyone's ability to sort out a qractical problem which goes to the heart of harmonisation.

“Very emotional things, coins,” said one nonplussed official as the various merits of polygonal versus round were thrashed out in the Council.

Harmonisation of any kind is a very emotional thing, it would seem.

So it's back to the drawing-board for the mint directors and jolly good luck to the lot of them. If they can come up with a batch of coins which appeals equally to 15 different tastes and traditions, they deserve a pay rise.

In any currency they like.