Mr. John Beggs:

You made reference to Mr. McWilliams talking about the high price of housing, or he may have described it in other terms, but essentially I agreed with the point that house prices were extremely high, had become and were increasingly becoming unaffordable for a growing number of people, which is where this housing market in late, in 2006, was headed. I mean I do reference this in my statement, that we were running out of road when it comes to housing, that the affordability issue was reaching critical points whereby when you stress test people's incomes and their ability to afford to buy a house, that we were running at a point where fewer and fewer people would actually be able to meet those criteria, and that, may I say, was against a backdrop where, of extremely expensive average houses. I mean, I take the view and my comment, my written statement, I dismiss econometric evidence around house prices as being, you know, just that. But I base my view about the housing market on my own personal experience of my own children in the housing market in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and the extremely high prices that they had to pay for average properties. And, I'm thinking to myself, you know, how is this going to continue? What way are we going to manage a business, a sustainable business, if house prices are of this level? It's all right, you know, offering more and more better terms so that people can afford to buy it, but at the end of the day they are being pushed out to 40-year mortgages with, you know, interest-only or whatever. This was, actually, running out of steam long before Morgan Kelly pronounced, in my opinion, and our reports, notwithstanding some of the titles we put on some of our reports, and our view that "we hope for an equilibrium", or "we hope for a soft landing". The evidence is in the reports, and I did actually supply the committee with the full text of our April '06 report, because they've only given a finfactssummary of it here, but it does contain, as I said, the evidence that things were becoming untenable.