As has been said, some committee inquiries attract more attention than others, but this inquiry resonated with the public more than most, and it's easy to see why, because there have been more than 200 banks closed in Wales since 2008. We did receive 874 responses to the online survey, and 87 per cent of personal banking customers told us they'd been impacted by closures, and at the same time, 78 per cent of business banking customers said the same.

My own region has been the hardest hit, with rural communities being the worst affected, and if I tried to name every town affected, I would run out of time. That is how bad this situation is. We have now a situation where even notable towns like Hay-on-Wye have no high-street bank left. Carmarthen East and Dinefwr has lost four fifths of its banking network in the last five years.

So, that really is the background and the context for this inquiry, and we did some good work, and we looked at some interesting ideas, like the Preston model, and that's a co-operative approach that focuses on lending to local businesses to boost those local economies.

But the reality is that something around 86 per cent of people bank with the large banks, and it's what's not in the report that says the most to me, namely that the big high-street banks declined to give oral evidence. And why should they? We only bailed out most of them to the tune of £500 billion a decade ago—£500 billion in the last 10 years. Four years ago, the industry agreed a protocol to apparently minimise the impact of closures. But crucially, the UK Government let them wriggle out of their last-bank-in-town agreement that would have prevented them abandoning the places that we all serve. So, when the last branch closed in Hay this year, I see that some people were calling on Powys council to offer reduced business rates as an incentive for the bank to stay. I think we need to get real here. We're talking about multi-billion-pound businesses. They're leaving because they can; they're not leaving because they can't afford the rent or they can't afford to stay. And anyway, why on earth should we, the public purse, subsidise these people yet again? No.

In refusing to give oral evidence to our inquiry, the big banks, as far as I'm concerned, have shown us the same disregard that they've shown the communities that they've abandoned. And they've been allowed to do so by successive Tory Governments. Just as the Tories used the global financial crash as a cynical excuse for an ideological assault on the state, to tear holes in the welfare system and cut public services and generally retreat from their social responsibilities, the banks used it to lay off tens of thousands of workers and shut up shop for even more profit.

Of course, I want to be clear here that I'm talking about the big banks; I'm not talking about the mutuals that we went to see and who were really very rooted in their communities because they felt part of those communities and they wanted to carry on serving those communities. So, I wanted to make certain that I made that clear.