Analysis by Ian King, business presenter

The first point to make is that the banks are under no obligation to pass on the full extent of increases in Bank rate to savers.

Near-zero interest rates of the kind the UK had from 2009 to 2021 had a crushing impact on net interest margins - the spread between what borrowers are charged and depositors are paid - and so the banks will be looking to rebuild profits after a decade in which they have been under intense pressure.

A second key factor is that the banks also know a lot of their customers do not trust some of the challenger banks offering more competitive rates and, accordingly, trade off that inertia.

Savers are, in effect, paying a safety premium for keeping their money with a trusted name like Barclays or NatWest than with a bank of which they may never have heard.

That, incidentally, is completely rational. Many will recall how, during the financial crisis, savers who had opened deposit accounts with the little-known Icesave, attracted by its market-beating rates, faced months of uncertainty when it collapsed in 2008.

Another part of the answer is there is no link between the savings market and the mortgage market. The pricing of both is down to individual banks based on conditions in the market. And it is a fact that mortgage borrowers are more inclined to shop around in search of a better rate than savers are.

Unhappiness at the refusal of deposit-takers to pass onto savers the full extent of interest rate rises is not new. In 1998, the then-chancellor, Gordon Brown, commissioned Don Cruickshank, the former telecoms regulator, to carry out a review of banking services in the UK.

Mr Cruickshank's report, when it was published in March 2000, concluded that UK banking customers - both personal and business - were overpaying by between 拢3-拢5bn per year and, for personal customers, he identified three product areas - credit cards, savings accounts and personal loans - as being particularly problematic.

His report did, undoubtedly, lead to some improvements. It became far easier to switch current accounts while the speed at which money is transferred from one account to another increased dramatically.

Yet the complaints made today about savings rates remain similar to the ones made 25 years ago.

Mr Cruickshank uncovered, during the course of his research, that the average person keeps the same savings account for almost 10 years - while only 18% of savers knew exactly what rate of interest they were receiving.

It seems little has changed in terms of customer inertia and, until it does, that minority of savers who actually do know how much interest they are receiving are likely to carry on feeling badly done by.