Professor Patrick Honohan:

On the basis of the very small number of audits - it is very costly to do an audit and one does not want to waste money on this - we can and are going back to the banks and saying: "This is not going to work. Do not give us any of those and redo any of the ones that are being approached in the same way. They are not sustainable." They will need to respond. They are learning as well. They say they never understood anything about sustainable mortgages and made loans on the basis of rules of thumb and never encountered situations of mortgages which were barely affordable by persons or had to bring them down to that level. That was not their model. This interaction should get us to more satisfactory solutions so that constituents will not come to members to point out that banks offered them something impossible with which they cannot live.

It is a slow process involving tens of thousands of cases and banks that are learning. We know all the problems. The model we are developing will improve all the time but it is the right framework.