The Governor reviews the regulatory changes affecting building societies in the United Kingdom over the past two years and comments on the impact on the societies of the stock market collapse-noting that one consequence of the sharp improvement in their retail inflows since the crash has been a welcome reduction in the likelihood of an unbalanced assessment of the benefits of conversion into banks.
On international aspects of housing finance, the Governor welcomes the opening up of markets that would form part of the European Community's move to a single internal market, but stresses that two important corollaries must be fulfilled: there must be total clarity of responsibility for the prudential supervision of credit institutions in the Community, and they must be subjected to similar tests of capital adequacy; and the opening up of markets must be more than in form only, even if in practice exploitation of the opportunities created may prove a slow process.
Building societies: the changing environment - Governor's speech