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Northern Rock

We are dealing with a very specific case where the Government have already advanced £30 billion, and I am concerned with how that enormous investment by the taxpayer should be protected. To pursue the argument—I am just raising a possibility; we do not know that it will happen, and we hope that it will not—let us suppose that property prices fall very substantially. Twice in my working lifetime, domestic property prices have fallen in real terms by more than 25 per cent. It could happen again. We have been at the peak of an unprecedented bubble, the largest in the developed world. If it were to happen again, the obvious question is: what would happen to the value of the security that the Government have been given by the bank? One person understood this all along: Mr. Applegarth, the chief executive. He is still there, sitting in his chair at the bank. He understood all this and, at the peak of the market, he sold his shares. He was urging the small investors—to whom the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson) has rightly drawn our attention—to invest in his bank while he was selling up. We all know what happened. He invested his money in a very large country estate and bought a fleet of sports cars for his wife. That person is still at his desk at the Northern Rock bank; he is directing its affairs and is responsible for taxpayers' money. That is one of the unbelievable aspects of how this whole affair has been managed.