Mr. Stephen Bell:

We would not start to get into this definition of "strategic default", which has so many different meanings to so many different people. I guess that what we are seeing is that mortgage arrears tend to be accompanied by difficulties with other outlays. We carried out some analysis on the standard financial statements and found that for every €1 of mortgage repayments, there was in excess of 60 cent of unsecured debt repayments. If someone is prioritising the repayment of short-term consumer finance and, as a result, is prejudicing his or her ability to remain in his or her home, we would consider that to be a bad choice. As to whether it constitutes strategic default is not really for me to say. Where we see people who, month after month, simply do not pay anything and do not respond to considerable attempts from us to contact them, we would regard that as being something beyond bad form and to be something we need to deal with quite vigorously.