Prevention is better than cure, and no industry should be allowed to assume a level of importance whereby it requires a bailout funded by the public purse, said Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England's executive director of banking services, in Madrid on Tuesday.

Explaining his vision on the role and form of living wills, Bailey used Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock as case studies of what happened in the absence of appropriate recovery and resolution plans. Such plans had two broad objectives, he