Mr. Matthew Elderfield:

If the individual was a director or senior manager of one of the banks that has required Government support, we have a flagging system for that explicitly to slow the whole thing down - as I said, to catch that. On our standards for fitness and probity, the probity side is a matter of one size fits all. You must be proper whether you are a small director or a big director, if Deputy Ross knows what I am saying, and it is about criminal background and the rest of it.

Fitness is very much relevant to the individual and the role that he or she plays, but one point we explicitly wrote in - there was much debate about this internally and I insisted it should go in there - was a reference to the track record of the individual in his or her previous roles. You have to interpret that in the context. I tend to be bad at giving good examples, but the questions are what sort of role the person held in the past, how directly responsible he or she was for the failure, and how big an institution he or she was in compared to where he or she is going now. I will give an extreme example. If a person who was a HR director or senior manager in a bank that got into trouble now wants to be a non-executive director of a fund, one thinks, "All right; the person was in a bank that got into trouble," but he or she gets through. If a person who was a senior manager or head of commercial property lending in a bank wants to go into a similar role in that bank, then one would slow it down. I am not going to say we have done it in that type of case, but there are cases that I am aware of in which we have said, "We have problems with you because of your track record in the past. We know about you from the past," and those persons have withdrawn.