Finance & Business World

The Bank of England’s rating among British voters plummeted in the past month on mounting unease about its handling of the financial crisis, an opinion poll by PoliticsHome.com showed.

The approval score for the U.K. central bank in a daily survey of 5,000 people dropped 15 points to minus 15 percent since December, the Web site said in a statement today. Since the data began in April last year, the bank’s rating was at zero, meaning it had drawn neither a strong positive nor negative approval rating.

“A 15-point drop for the Bank of England over just a month is very significant,” Freddie Sayers, editor of PoliticsHome, said in an e-mail. “Many people in Britain didn’t have an opinion either way about the bank until the recent spate of headlines, and its reputation seems to be forming as a negative rather than a positive.”

Governor Mervyn King, who will deliver his first speech of the year today, has overseen a drop in the benchmark interest rate to the lowest in the bank’s three-century history. Deputy Governor John Gieve said on Jan. 16 that reductions in interest rates, tax cuts and bank rescues have yet to take their full effect on the British economy as the recession deepens.

“Instead of seeing the bank as coming in to rescue the financial mess, people seem to be viewing it as part of the problem,” Sayers said no fax payday advance.

British Police

PoliticsHome tracks the approval rating of various public institutions including the British Broadcasting Corp. and the monarchy. The percentage with a negative impression from its daily survey of 5,000 adults is subtracted from the percentage with a positive impression to calculate an overall net approval rating. No margin of error was given.

The police, with an approval rating of minus 2 percent, now has a higher score than the central bank, PoliticsHome said. Parliament’s rating is minus 42 percent, and British business and businessmen scored minus 31 percent.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday authorized the Bank of England to buy 50 billion pounds ($73 billion) in assets and the Treasury to guarantee hundreds of billion pounds of securities hurt by turmoil in financial markets. The measures build on October’s 50-billion pound bank recapitalization program, which included a 250 billion-pound bank credit line.

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