And finally…rub-off the queen

The new notes, which have hit the streets of Britain this year to much fan-fair, are made of a thin, transparent and flexible film made of polypropylene designed to resist dirt and not crease like the cotton paper notes that have been in use for more than a century.

Printed designs on them are supposed to adhere to a special coating on the plastic notes, which are said to last 2.5 times longer.

And while that might be true of the plastic itself, it seems it may not be the case for the designs.

Stuart McLean, who is a print centre manager in Cambuslang, has come forward to say that while he and colleagues were experimenting with a Clydesdale Bank plastic five pound note, which features an image of the Forth Bridge and has been issued to commemorate the bridge’s 125th anniversary with a portrait of Sir William Arrol, he tried to erase a grubby mark on it with a simple old-school rubber.

He was shocked to discover that rather than take off just the mark, the eraser could also remove large parts of the note’s blue dye, leaving only security numbers and the see-through hologram behind.

Speaking to the local Herald newspaper, Mr McLean said: “I had a bit of down time at work and we were talking about the new note, and I happened to have one on me so I got it out and noticed it had a dirty mark.

“I used a pencil eraser to rub it out and I found that the ink underneath rubbed away as well. I kept on going and was able to turn one side completely white.

“I find it very strange that it could be as easy as that to basically erase a bank note and it’s something which would not be possible with the old one.”

Mr McLean said he could reproduce the same result with a Bank of England note, rubbing out the world ‘England’.

He added: “It’s not supposed to be as easy as this to get the ink out, and it’s like it just simply isn’t immersed into the fabric of the note like the ink on a cotton paper note.

“There’s something wrong with this, and makes me wonder about the £10 note that coming out soon. I find it hard to believe that all the stress tests the £5 note was subjected to didn’t pick up that it is as easy as this to remove the ink.”

A spokesman for note manufacturers De La Rue said that notes would not normally lose their ink, and insisted that Mr McLean’s had been subjected to “excessive and abnormal ink wear.”

He added: “Whilst ink wear is the ultimate failure mode of polymer banknotes in circulation, the ink wear displayed here appears to us to have been achieved by a method not representative of what happens to a banknote under normal circulation conditions.”

It was previously brought to public attention that the plastic notes could also be shrunk to a fraction of the size if it was exposed to high heat.