Mr. Andrew Blair:

The bank's primary goal has always been to support viable businesses. That applies to businesses that are family homes and also people with buy to let properties. To the extent that businesses are viable we will try to find a way to restructure them and support them through that. The number of businesses that were once viable and became non-viable because of the economic crash was extremely high. It was an extreme time. We supported customers over very long periods of forbearance from 2009 to 2015 and simultaneously tried to rebuild an organisation that was capable of supporting growth for our customers for the future. Part of that process was resolving the significant overhang of customers with non-performing loans. We could not avail of transferring assets to NAMA at the larger end, and we had to resolve the matter for ourselves, and we set about doing so with the full knowledge and understanding of both our shareholder and ultimately shareholders and the regulators. We understand that there are customers who would prefer to be dealing with Ulster Bank still, rather than an investment fund, but we had to deal with the issues before us, which included a large overhang of customers whose situation we needed to resolve. We have tried to deal with customers whose businesses were viable and co-operated with us. During the period in question viability became very difficult for everyone and we appreciate that - people suffered and sacrificed enormous amounts for their businesses - but many businesses became unviable. There is no pleasure in this for us but we needed to resolve the situation.