| State government savings and agricultural banks joined with mutuals to complement private sector priorities. |
| It believes, as Britain's biggest building society, that it must consistently demonstrate that mutuals are cheaper than plcs. |
| Between them, the former mutuals are holding either shares or cash bonuses which have still to be claimed by more than 500,000 former members. |
| So I was already wondering, as this is one of the UK's very last mutuals, whether the time is right for me to break with convention and vote. |
| Obviously our membership structure is different to most other mutuals which means we can't pay out the windfall in cash. |
| Therefore, we don't need access to the capital market, a motivation that has driven some other mutuals to become stock companies. |
