Professor Patrick Honohan:

Getting accurate measures here is quite challenging. First, there is the question of what concepts we should use. We have had to develop these concepts, which are not well established internationally. Few countries have had such a massive scale of problems. When one defines the concept one wants to measure, one must communicate that accurately to the banks in order that they understand, can state their systems do not collect that but collect something else, and can ask if this is what we want. Getting consistency and accuracy has been a challenge. There have been a lot of revisions. The committee will note, for example, one of the numbers in the table I circulated goes up and then goes down again. Commentators ask how can it go down as it should have been increasing constantly, but it is a reclassification. On consideration, they state they see it as such.

There remain challenges in that regard. We are not hiding information. We have not got a mass of disorganised information. We are constantly trying to refine and improve, but it has been challenging. The banks' systems have not been geared up to providing the answers to these kinds of questions.