RBS exits £8bn insurance policy

16 December 2013 Last updated at 19:35 GMT  RBS had been due to pay the final £320m instalment of the insurance scheme next year Royal Bank of Scotland has left an £8bn government insurance scheme designed to bolster the bank's financial strength.

The bank had been paying £320m a year for the government guarantee, agreed four years ago as a backstop against a further erosion of its capital.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said exiting the Contingent Capital Facility (CCF) was a "rare bit of good news" for the bank.

The CCF agreement was initially for five years.

RBS will now not have to pay next year's final instalment.

The bank, 81% state-owned following its near-collapse at the height of the financial crisis, said it has now strengthened it capital position and that the Bank of England's Prudential Regulatory Authority had approved its exit from the CCF.

The BBC's Robert Peston said the CCF "was an arrangement which meant that RBS could be confident of receiving £8bn from the Treasury if is capital was eroded in a dangerous way by losses".

"But it was very expensive," he said. "RBS will now not have to pay next year's £320m - and this year's profits will be boosted by that amount."

He said it was good news for RBS, coming after a period in which it has been hit by the latest in a series of embarrassing IT meltdowns as well as a $100m (£61m) fine over sanctions-busting allegations.

The bank has also faced claims that it drove distressed firms to collapse to buy back their assets at rock-bottom prices.

It had entered into the CCF arrangement as part of the Asset Protection Scheme (APS). It exited the APS in October last year after, having paid a total of £2.5bn since February 2009.

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Revaluing donor and recipient bodies in the globalised blood economy: Transitions in public policy on blood safety in the United Kingdom

Impact Factor:1.137 | Ranking:21/36 in Social Sciences, Biomedical | 81/136 in Public, Environmental & Occupational Health | 5-Year Impact Factor:1.396Source:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
The clinical use of blood has a long history, but its apparent stability belies the complexity of contemporary practices in this field. In this article, we explore how the production, supply and deployment of blood products are socially mediated, drawing on theoretical perspectives from recent work on ‘tissue economies’. We highlight the ways in which safety threats in the form of infections that might be transmitted through blood and plasma impact on this tissue economy and how these have led to a revaluation of donor bodies and restructuring of blood economies. Specifically, we consider these themes in relation to the management of recent threats to blood safety in the United Kingdom. We show that the tension between securing the supply of blood and its products and ensuring its safety may give rise to ethical concerns and reshape relations between donor and recipient bodies.

© 2013 SAGE Publications. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DCThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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