AS a teacher by profession, I’m used to teaching young people the importance of staying safe on the internet.

But for those of us who are a little longer in the tooth, online fraud and keeping our money safe online is something we don’t always think about.

I’m a member of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, and recently led a committee inquiry into online fraud. I was surprised to learn that online fraud now the most prevalent crime in the country, causing significant distress and financial loss – estimated to be £10bn a year. Its clear that more needs to be done to tackle the problem.

At the moment, banks can refuse to reimburse customers who have been scammed, and are estimated to be holding £130m in ‘frozen’ accounts as a result of fraud. This can’t be right, and I’ll be pressing the Government and the banks to make changes to make sure that the system works in favour of customers.

In addition, banks do not have to release information on their fraud records, claiming that doing so would attract fraudsters. Attracting more fraudsters isn’t the risk – the fraudsters are already there.

It is time for our banks to take more responsibility for protecting us, their customers. Currently, there’s no information available to the public to let us see how well individual banks are performing and what steps they are taking to reduce online fraud.

One solution the Public Accounts Committee has recommended is the production of a ‘fraud prevention league table’, which would rank banks according to how well they’ve prevented and dealt with fraud. It would help us make a choice about where we want to keep our money and which banks are going to keep it safe from fraudsters.

Its an idea that has worked in the car industry, where ranking which manufacturers are the best on safety encouraged greater competition between companies, leading to a ‘race to the top’ and encouraging huge improvements in standards.

A similar ranking of banks would, I believe, encourage them to be proactive about doing more to protect our money from online fraud, and would help to make sure that customers can choose the safest bank accounts.

I want to choose a bank that will do everything it can to protect my money from online scammers and that will reimburse me if I fall victim to fraud on the internet. But that can’t be done without information about the performance of different banks being published.

I’ll be keeping up the pressure in Parliament. It's time for the Government to force the banks to do better, and to make sure that as customers we can make an informed choice as to the best place to put our money.