The Treasury Committee has written to chief executives at nine banks and building societies to request information on the scale and impact of IT failures which have affected their businesses over the last two years.

The letters follow the recent outage at Barclays which led to some customers being unable to access certain services for up to three days from Friday 31 January – the HMRC self-assessment deadline and a typical time for salaries to be paid into personal accounts.

The Bank of England has previously outlined its view 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 is are asking firms for the number of instances and amount of time in hours each current account provider has suffered IT failures which prevented customers using their services.

MPs are also looking to collect data on the number of customers who have been affected and how much each firm has paid out in compensation to those affected. The reason for each outage has also been requested.

CEOs at Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Danske, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest Group and Santander have been asked to respond by Wednesday 26 February.

Treasury Select Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier MP, said: “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.

“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.

She added: “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.”