Nationwide warning over €422m bank tax

Britain’s biggest building society lender Nationwide says a new banking tax will cost it £300m (€422.7m) over the next five years and potentially hurt lending.

Nationwide, Britain’s second biggest provider of house loans, said the tax cost was the equivalent of the capital required to fund £10bn worth of lending.

Chief executive Graham Beale warned that the introduction of a new surcharge on profits from next year, announced by Finance Minister George Osborne last month, would have a disproportionate impact on building societies, which are smaller than major banks and focus on domestic lending.