This is what they do after every banking crisis and, although well-intentioned, it is ultimately misconceived.
Putting better brakes on a car does not stop accidents, it simply encourages the 17-year-olds to drive faster so that when they do hit something, it is even more serious.
What the country really needed, as a few of the shrewder minds observed at the time, was not constraints on banking as we know it but a return to banking as we used to know it.
We need banks to stop trying to make money by frenzied trading and gambling in the world’s fixed-income, currency and commodity markets and focus instead on providing basic deposit and loan services in local communities — the traditional role of banking.
We require the return of the local bank manager as a trusted member of the community, dispensing advice and extending credit to those who needed it as much on the basis of their character and integrity as their business plan.
The banks said this was a pipe dream.
An analysis of the balance sheets of the big High Street banks showed that less than 15% of their loans went to conventional businesses, and only a tiny fraction within that was allocated to small businesses.
The vast majority of their lending was property-related, almost equally split between commercial loans and residential mortgages.
This, they said, was because it was impossible to make money in the old fashioned way,
And they obviously had no intention of trying, which is why a decade later little has changed.
Today, the big banks are doing broadly the same kind of things they were doing on the eve of the crisis, but on an even bigger scale.
This is where Handelsbanken comes in. It announced its results yesterday but, because it is a Swedish bank and the UK media is parochial, it got very little press attention despite the fact that it now has more than 200 branches in this country.
Our banks should look at Handelsbanken and feel ashamed because it does everything they say no longer works, and makes a pile of money out of it.
It puts physical branches with a local manager in small communities.
Its rule of thumb is that a branch manager’s customers should all be within the area he or she can see from the local church steeple.
Managers take their own decisions within that area — they do not have to refer everything to a regional office or a credit committee, and this gives them the power to provide a service tailored to the needs of the individual customer.
To further this, its staff do not have sales targets or bonuses.
As a result, they foster long-term relationships, and year after year they win awards for customer service and satisfaction.
And so to the figures for the UK. Customer deposits rose 22% to £10.59 billion.
Net lending to individuals and corporates increased by 11% to £17.7 billion and, within that, business lending was up 10% to £11.42 billion.
To put this in perspective, the biggest firms in the peer-to-peer industry — which gets a lot of column inches — lend between £1 billion and £2 billion, so Handelsbanken in the UK is bigger than most of them put together.
And unlike most of the peer-to-peer operators, it makes a profit.
This increased in the last 12 months by 5% to £181.2 million.
Which leaves just one question. If Handelsbanken can deliver local personalised banking in the way that a lot of customers still clearly value, and make a comfortable profit in the process, why do the traditional British banks find it so difficult?
