You have 3 choices when deciding what to do with your umbilical cord blood:
Store it privately : This is a charged service but keeps the cells for your family only.
Donate it to a public bank : though the NHS or ANT. This is a free service but unfortunately means your cells will not be kept for you. They may be used for medical research or discarded. Only approx 30% of donated samples are used to help treat other people around the world. For altruistic donation, the cord blood can only be collected at certain hospitals in the UK.
Throw it away as medical waste : losing the stem cells forever.
At present, the only option to store cord tissue in the UK is to bank it privately