Ms Isolde Goggin:

I would describe it very much in terms of the mortgage market we have now, where we have had a number of players leaving the market, where we have had people very reluctant to enter into the market and where we have had the banks, which are in huge financial difficulties, as we know, doing their best to push consumers off the products that are better value for them and onto the products that are worse value for them. It is a complex market and the explanation for what is wrong there, to our mind, is not that the banks all got together and decided to fix prices, it is that they are all in difficulty and they are all using all the means they can, whether it appears legitimate or not, to get out of that.

What we did in the mortgages options paper is go through a very comprehensive review of the mortgage market. We compared it many other markets and we looked at how those markets were regulated and how competition operated within them. We made recommendations in regard to the short term and how one can take business-friendly initiatives to encourage new entrants into the market, encourage new products and try to speed up the authorisation-----