Q:

Do we still need to use £ or £ instead of the British Pound £ sign in html?

There's nothing on http://caniuse.com about this that I can see, but in limited testing on very up-to-date browsers it seems the British pound symbol (HTML5 + UTF-8 page) no longer needs the html entities used.
I wonder if anyone knows if its safe to just use the £ sign in modern browsers now?

A:

It's not depending on the browsers or the operating system. It depends on the charset that you store and display the data.
If you have the <meta> tag with UTF-8 and your database with a compatible charset, and you use a server-side script that's writting in UTF-8, you can use the symbols instead the HTML entities.
HTML entities (&euro; or &pound; are safely between charsets, so doesn't matter what charset is defined. But the good practices said that you need to develop in the same charset all your code.

