and £50m (38%) and 17 under £10m (2%). The largest trustee savings banks were based in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast. Those based in the north of England accounted for 50% of total funds, while those in the south of England and Wales accounted for 27%, those in Scotland for 19% and those in Northern Ireland for less than 5%. Geographical location of the 1,655 trustee savings bank branches was also unevenly distributed, with branch density higher in parts of Scotland and the north of England. In 1978 there was one savings bank branch per 18,000 persons in Scotland, but only one per 75,000 persons in London. There was a similar pattern for individual accounts, with two out of five persons in Scotland having an account at a trustee savings bank, one out of five in the north of England, but only one out of twenty in London and the Home Counties. In 1973 at the time of the report by the Page Committee, there were still 73 TSBs and 1,549 branch offices. Eight years had passed since the introduction of cheque accounts. The TSBs sensed the need to respond to changing customer needs. However some individual TSBs had grown faster than others. The assets of the Scottish TSBs, traditionally the strongest members of the TSB movement, had been growing more slowly than those in Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales and the West Country, which had built up enviable reserves and were anxious to protect their territories. London and southern England remained the areas where the savings banks had little presence. While savings banks and government were considering the movement's future organisational structure and functions as well as those of individual TSBs, the TSBs remained restricted in what services they could offer: they could not give loans to their customers, and there were still limits on how funds could be invested. At this critical stage, the Page Committee recommended that the TSBs be freed from government control, allowed to develop their service range, and thus become a third force in banking. These recommendations were high on the agenda of the newly elected government of Harold Wilson. But the pace of change was to be slow. Officials at the Bank of England, with the support of Sir Athelstan Caröe, then chairman of the Trustee Savings Banks Association, called for the establishment of a strong central authority to assume many of the