Britain’s Independent Commission on Banking has presented its final report. In assessing it, we should bear in mind the damage wreaked on the UK by the crisis: it produces 10 per cent less than it was set to do before the recession; growth is stagnant; taxpayers were put on the hook for hundreds of billions of pounds in possible bank losses; 2.5m people are out of work.

At least part of this is due to a banking system failure that banks were encouraged to court by perverse incentives and implicit subsidies. The task of Sir John Vickers, ICB chair, and his colleagues was to find ways to lower the risk of it happening again. They did a good job. The UK economy and financial system will be healthier and more prosperous if the government implements the ICB proposal – provided it does so in full and swiftly.

This newspaper expressed reservations when it first became clear that the core proposal was to ring-fence retail banks from investment banking and trading activities. The FT, while not opposed, questioned how much good a ringfence would do, given that deposit-taking banks bent on gambling will always find risky retail investments, and pure investment banks can be systemically as risky as retail banks. The goal must be to alleviate the too-big-to-fail problem: make banks less failure-prone and limit collateral damage when failure comes.