Trade credit insurance tightens

• by Robert Peston

An essential element in the government's forthcoming package to stem the pernicious shrinkage of credit in the economy will be measures to compensate for the devastating impact on many companies of the withdrawal of trade credit insurance.

That probably sounds deeply dull and technical. But please read on, because this stuff matters to all of us.

For smaller companies, the importance of trade credit insurance is often that they can't borrow from banks, unless they've insured their sales to corporate customers.

The banks make this stipulation because it absolves them from having to assess the credit-worthiness of their borrowers in detail - because at least part of the credit risk has been laid off to an insurance company.

So the availability of such insurance is literally a matter of life and death for many businesses.

Woolworths is one of the more extreme examples.

When insurers would no longer provide cover to Woolies' suppliers in the autumn, that was the penultimate nail in the coffin of the ailing general retailer - because suppliers insisted that Woolworths pay cash upfront to them for orders, which meant that Woolies was forced to draw on its borrowing facilities, which in turn took the retailer up to the limit of what its bankers were prepared to lend.

And the rest is the sorry story you know: the demise of a historic high street name that was forced to liquidate everything so that the bankers could get their money back.

The point is that trade credit insurance is central to hundreds of billions of pounds in trade and the provision of finance to companies of all sizes.

When it's withdrawn, as has been happening for months, small companies are unable to fulfil valuable orders placed by big companies and those bigger companies lose access to vital supplies.

So a rational decision by insurers to scale back their cover on sales to companies perceived as vulnerable to our economic contraction is rippling through the economy in a damaging way: cover is being withdrawn because we appear to be in a sharp recession, and its withdrawal is making that recession significantly worse.

Part of the problem is that the insurers seem to me to have massively underpriced the cover they provide. Just as banks charged ludicrously low rates of interest during the years of the credit bubble, so the trade credit insurers insured hundreds of billions of pounds of trade for tiny premiums.

According to statistics from the Association of British Insurers, there were £334m of premiums written by the insurers in 2007, covering £282bn of sales by British companies.

Or, to put it another way: insurers were receiving premiums equivalent to the turnover of a medium-size business to protect more than 20% of the output of the entire British economy.

Scary or what?

Those aggregated premiums were equivalent to a minute 0.1% of the sum insured - down from 0.26% in 1995. Which would only make economic sense in a world where there are never recessions.

One illustration that the premium was too low is that claims received by insurers in 2008 are likely to have been rather more than total aggregated gross premiums received in the previous year, extrapolating from trends in the first nine months of the year.

But the insurers have been protecting themselves from the worst losses by simply withdrawing cover for new orders to companies seen as weak. In other words, unlike insurance provided to you and me on our homes, for example, the trade credit insurers have been able to withhold protection as soon as they detected stormy conditions.

To restate the painful paradox: insurance designed to give confidence to companies that they would be paid by corporate customers is being scaled back in a way that's magnifying the woes of businesses big and small.

What's to be done?

Well, in France, a new system is being implemented whereby taxpayers are sharing the insurance risk with private-sector insurers on supplies to viable companies.

And I would expect the Business Department and the Treasury to implement a similar system of co-insurance by taxpayers.

But that can only be a short-term solution.

In the longer term, the supply of finance to small and medium-size businesses has to be overhauled, so that the viability of those businesses is no longer dependent on insurance that's only available when the sun is shining.