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Rather than expose wrong doing among the lending community all these headlines did was create more hatred among consumers for financial services providers and expose how little some journalists knew about how banks and building societies operate.

It is Libor rather than the decisions made by the Bank of England's monetary policy committee that dictate the cost of a home loan.

At the end of May when Libor was compared with the Bank of England's base rate you got a good idea of how willing banks have been to lend money to each other and therefore the level of confidence within the debt capital markets.

As it stood at the end of last month the base rate was 5 per cent and three-month Libor stood closer to 6 per cent.

Last week the British Bankers' Association announced a package of changes to the governance of its Libor.

The BBA issued a paper calling for views on further changes to Libor, which is used to set rates for financial products worth around $350 trillion.

The changes announced by the BBA include tighter scrutiny of the rates contributed by banks into the setting mechanism, so any discrepancies in the rates must be justified by individual contributing banks.

When unveiling the changes Angela Knight, chief executive of the BBA, said Libor had stood the test of time.

Libor has been published every working day since 1985 and Ms Knight pointed out it is among the most transparent indices in the world.

Ms Knight said: "These changes will further strengthen BBA Libor and the confidence of its many users."

Having met Ms Knight on several occasions both in her reign at the BBA and prior to that at the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers, I feel yet again she has hit the nail on the head.

For almost a quarter of a century it has shown banks were willing to trust each other and help out a neighbour in need of more cash to bolster its business.

But the reason Libor seems to be set to change is not because it is no longer transparent but due to the fact the lending community no longer likes what it is seeing in the mirror.

As we head towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century Libor has shown there is a lack of confidence between lenders and lending between them has all but dried up.

It is a case of them being too cautious because they simply do not trust one another's assets.

It is not Libor that needs to be changed. It is trust that needs to be restored among mortgage lenders. If banks felt their neighbours would be able to pay them back then Libor would become more in line with the Bank of England base rate.

Ms Knight hopes changes to Libor will restore confidence among banks. I think greater transparency between banks about the pluses and minuses on their respective balance sheets is far more likely to do that than any tinkering with a rate that has worked well for years.

Libor does not need changing. It is the reflection of distrust that Libor is holding up to banking bosses that needs to be altered.

Emma Ann Hughes is editor of Mortgage Adviser