Breaking up will be hard to do....

If you've lost faith with your bank because you blame it for the financial crisis, or are upset with corporate greed, or have just had enough of their IT problems, you don't really have many alternatives.

The UK's biggest five banks - Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS and Santander - dominate the marketplace. Excluding Santander, the other four banks together have 85% of the personal current account market.

Labour leader Ed Miliband wants to reshape the banking landscape. He is calling for existing banks to be forced to sell off hundreds of branches, thereby increasing the number of main UK banks by adding at least two new "challenger" banks.

Mr Miliband's view is that more banking competition would lead to more consumer choice and ultimately lower charges.

The UK did once have a much more diverse banking landscape. But wholesale demutualisation of building societies in the 1990s, together with the subsequent 2008 financial crisis, has seen many of the mutuals and the competition that went with them disappear as they were absorbed into bigger companies.

Last month, business secretary Vince Cable described the building societies' demutualisation as "one of the greatest acts of economic vandalism in modern times", leading to commercial banks "abandoning locally based relationship banking in the decade before the recent financial crisis".

Britain now has just 47 building societies, from the biggest - Nationwide and the Yorkshire - to small, local societies that have only a few thousand members. That's a far cry from the 481 that existed in 1970.

To get back to this level of banking variety, observers say actions will need to go a lot further than Mr Miliband has suggested.

UK workers - Fewer holidays and greater stress

As it is revealed that Britain has re-entered recession, the impact of the economic downturn on employees is coming to light.

In a recent survey carried out by Nuffield Health, 1,500 adults were questioned in relation to workplace satisfaction. The results show a worrying rise in stress levels of employees, who are taking fewer holidays and working longer hours due to the effect of the recession. Over half of the people questioned admitted to increases in stress levels in recent years and to their personal lives being affected as a result of workplace stress.

While those in Yorkshire were shown to have the best work-life balance, people working in London came out at the bottom. It was revealed that 44% of the Londoners surveyed had not used up all of their holiday entitlement. Reasons for not taking holiday allowances were varied: some claimed to be too busy, others could not afford a holiday, while others feared that taking a break would affect their job security. It was also revealed that almost a third of all those surveyed worked up to seven hours a week on unpaid overtime.

With the current rate of unemployment hovering at 8.3%, just 0.1% short of the 12-year high, growing numbers of people are desperate simply to have a job. As a result, those who are working are increasingly willing to tolerate circumstances that are far from ideal, simply to remain in employment.

The results of the survey have also highlighted the recession’s potentially damaging effects to the overall personal and physical health of the nation. A quarter of the people interviewed admitted to using alcohol to help themselves cope with increased stress, whilst 29% revealed that they argued more with those close to them since the beginning of the downturn.