Ms Ethna Tinney:

My sense is that in 2005 there was still a tremendous, sort of, feelgood that everything was going to be the best of all things possible. And the volumes of tracker mortgages that, therefore, that we were attracting blinded us to the dangers of what would happen in terms of depressing the margin and so on and the final outcome, which meant that once again, we can't afford the tracker mortgages - well, not me, because I'm not involved anymore.

But the standard variable rate is now actually shoring up the trackers, which is most unfair on the people on the standard variable rate. No, it is surprising that it didn't strike any of the good brains on the board that this was actually dangerous.