Mr. John Trethowan:

This is an area about which I would worry. I have explained in previous reports that because businesses, rightly or wrongly, perceive that it is difficult to get bank credit and are keen to do business and get turnover, they have been extending numbers of days out and taking trade credit, so it is almost a secondary banking system. That concerns me slightly because if a business starts to go down and has a large creditor book, all of the other businesses that have lent it money in effect will take a hit as a bad debt. In Northern Ireland, we recently lost a large, long-established and well-respected building firm that left £15 million of debt behind it and a number of sub-contractors have gone down as a result of that.