Now that the banks are going to be forced to fall back on their retail operations, it is a good time to rethink the domestic business model. This does not have to be the same for all banks. Competition could return through a diversity of the kind of service offered, rather than through more banks all offering more or less the same services.

The sheer inefficiency of UK bank bureaucracies in their domestic operations can be compared with public services at their worst. Public services at their best now outperform the banks – so government ownership could actually improve bank performance. The banks should be made more accountable to the public, as public services already are.

Examples come from my own experience but are matched by that of others. Banks use the internet as little as possible to avoid fraud; instead they use the post, in which letters are lost or stolen, and the telephone, which is overloaded and often fails to give results after interminable waiting times.