The Treasury Select Committee has written to the chief executives of the UK’s top banks to ask for information on the scale and impact of IT failures impacting their businesses over the past two years.

The move comes a few weeks after Barclays faced a major technical glitch which impacted thousands of customers for up to three days.

MPs have contacted the bosses at Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Danske, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Group and Santander, with a deadline of responses set for 26 February.

The Bank of England has previously said that while one-off outages at a single firm are not necessarily a risk to the UK’s financial stability, IT failures which affect a systemically important firm or multiple organisations at the same time could be.

The Committee's letter asks firms to reveal the number of instances and amount of time in hours each current account provider has suffered IT failures which prevented customers using their services.

As well as this, the Committee wants to know how many customers have been affected and how much each firm has paid out in compensation to those affected.

MPs said that the reason for each outage has also been requested.

In its letter to Barclays, the Committee asked more detailed questions about its recent outage, including how customer service teams responded to distressed consumers and what action the board took to rectify the issue.

“When a bank’s IT system goes down, it can be a real problem for our constituents who were relying on accessing certain services so they can buy food or pay bills," said chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame Meg Hillier MP. “For it to happen at a major bank such as Barclays at such a crucial time of year is either bad luck or bad planning. Either way, it’s important to learn what has happened and what will be done about it.

"The rapidly declining number of high street bank branches makes the impact of IT outages even more painful; that’s why I've decided to write to some of our biggest banks and building societies."

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