Tiny, very light, and worth 5 pence. These things usually end up the change jar along with the copper 1p & 2p peices, as they take up far too much room and are pretty worthless. Especially useless for vending machines, as you spend more time filling up with enough money in 5p's to make the wait worth it.

Removing 1p and 2p coins from circulation would indeed stop shops charging £x.99 for everything, but would just result in everything costing £x.95 instead. This in turn would result in you getting a 5 pence piece as change from every transaction so everyone would have vastly more of them - something which I gather neither of the previous WU's are in favour of.

Of course we all know why things cost £x.99/£x.95, and why whichever coins you remove (unless you get rid of them all), things will never be made to cost a round number of pounds (/unit currency). That reason being that it is in shop owner's interests to make their employees have to open the till for every transaction to stop staff pocketing the money themselves and not ringing up the sale.

And anyway, 5 pence pieces are cute.