Mr. Stephen Bell:

Without repeating what we said before, everything has to be done on an individual basis and that will come down to the reason there is an arrears problem in the first place. We find there are some customers whose difficulty in making the payment is that they may have young children who are preventing one of the family members from working. We would be very sensitive to that and we would look to make sure that we did not try to have such a high payment that it effectively compromises the family's ability to live a normal life. If anybody had loans that relate to tools of the trade, such as a car which they need for work or whatever, we would not seek to put downward pressure on that if it was legitimately related to the means of generating an income to service a loan.

Where we would have some concerns is where people have multiple cars or they are making expenditure choices that do not seem to be commensurate with the fact that they may be three or more months in arrears with their home loan. In saying that, I refer to Mr. Brown's earlier point. With 72% of our mortgage customers on tracker rates of around 1.5% and with the average loan size for Ulster Bank at €173,000, it means that even a full capital and interest repayment is less than €700 a month. That is not an economic concession; that is a straight interest rate arrangement. When we look at available housing elsewhere through the private rental sector, one would be very hard-pressed to find some kind of reasonable accommodation for that, so what we try to do is instead of waiting until we have spent all the money and then see what is left to pay for the home, we try to think about what is a reasonable amount to pay towards the home loan and then make sure the rest will not compromise an ability to live a normal life.