Mr. David Went:

The critical thing that, you know, we had to consider in terms of our lending policy in relation to house mortgages was how affordable were the repayments to the borrower. And when you combined, you know, when you looked at historical affordability criteria of borrowers, you know, over this period by and large despite ... despite house price increases affordability actually improved because tax rates went down, interest rates, you know, in the ... in 1987, a house mortgage cost 15% for a period of time. By the time you got to 1997 or 2005, you were talking about 5%, so the interest rate had gone down. So the overall level of affordability of monthly repayments was actually at a very high level.