Mr. Justice John Hedigan:

It should not have happened. It was a truly terrible situation; that after all of the trouble we had had back in the early days with the collapsing banks and with efforts being made by everyone to try to regain some trust in the banking sector, that something like this should suddenly arrive. The Deputy is quite correct. I think it was the catalyst. There was talk of setting up a banking culture board because the UK had set one up in 2015 or, interestingly enough, a banking standards board. We see ourselves as somewhat different. We do not focus so much on the staff, which is what the UK does, we are focusing on the customer, which I think is a better approach.

There was pressure on the banks to do something in terms of setting up a culture board and I think the tracker mortgage scandal situation sparked that and was the catalyst for it. In terms of recent events in that regard, when I became aware of the letters that had been sent to the committee by the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman concerning the invocation of time limits, I immediately emailed all the five banking members of our board in order to find out the facts of the situation. I asked them which of the banks were invoking those time limits. I asked those who were to please contact me to discuss what I described in the email as "this troubling issue". Over the following days - it was less than a week - I was very pleased to see that all of the banks made public statements saying that they would no longer invoke the time limits. Subsequently, Ms Kelly and I met the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman to see what was going on, from his perspective. He seemed to be satisfied with the way things were going. I do not want to speak for him; he can speak for himself. We got the impression that he seemed to be satisfied with the way things were going. I hope that we played some part, perhaps in backing up the committee's interaction with the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman.