How do bankers repair their tarnished reputation? More help for start-ups, longer opening hours and an end to holidays taken in their name

There has been plenty written about why the banking world needs to brush up its act, but here's another reason that is often overlooked. There's a parliamentary act that the banks should be leading the charge to have repealed. The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 was introduced by Sir John Lubbock so that bank employees could have days off to spend time watching or playing cricket on village greens. Can you believe that? And so it was that bankers were elevated to the same status as religious saints throughout the UK and Ireland.

Apart from Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein, who thinks he's doing "God's work", I can't imagine even a banker thinking of him or herself in saintly terms. The rest of us certainly don't. Having squandered billions on disastrous schemes—and taken public money in bailouts—bankers still have the audacity to ignore business secretary Vince Cable's call to back new businesses.

Micro-financiers and loan sharks are having a field day as our new lenders of last resort. Often being charged 80 per cent interest rates, young entrepreneurs feel they have little option if they are going to get started. This is crippling future generations of inventors, wealth creators and business leaders. And this is not just about what the banks are doing with our money. The long-term implications of this inertia are deeply worrying.

A decade ago when I opened my first restaurant, NatWest provided a big boost by lending me £1m at 2.5 per cent above base rate with no guarantees. That loan was paid off long ago, and my businesses have gone on to make millions in profit. But despite their success, I wouldn't bother even asking a bank to back my latest ventures. Fortunately, I don't need to, so this is not a personally driven gripe.

Apart from starting to lend again, what else should bankers be doing? First, they must recognise that we no longer live in the days of cricket on village greens, or of a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday working week. To keep our competitive edge, we are a 24/7 economy. Banks need to be more representative of the businesses from which they make money.

The new, canine-friendly Metro Bank is opening itself to the needs of its customers rather than what suits management and, hopefully, the prospect of losing business will alert others to follow suit. Bankers should be repairing their image and indeed mending the economy. And surely it's time they took it upon themselves to be contrite, like MPs, and accept that things cannot carry on the way they used to. Gordon Brown has gone, but bankers are still here and they have to carry the can.

One way of boosting support for business is to scrap those outmoded bank holidays. The CBI has calculated that a single public holiday costs the British economy £6bn. So why not replace the Bank Holidays Act with a Bank in the Community Act that requires banks to commit to using a portion of their loanable funds to help small businesses and start-ups, and that calls on them to be open for business seven days a week.

The act could also commit to volunteering programmes for all bank employees in areas where they are based and to demand that when they hand out bonuses, a proportion—say 10 per cent—goes into the emerging Big Society Bank that will use money in dormant accounts to invest in social enterprises.

A new bankers' charter could be developed that makes a virtue of charitable and environmentally sustainable causes. Many of us would like to know how our own banks perform on a wider level than simply managing our accounts—we may even choose to switch to banks that practise what they preach.

Thanks to recent spot-fixing allegations, cricket is now reeking as much as banking and politics have been for some time. So let's persuade all bankers to work harder and on a more responsible mandate to get our economy off its knees. Scrap the holidays that hurt us so much—especially as they are taken in the name of people we have grown to mistrust. And let bankers have the chance to build a better image of themselves and work towards a more positive agenda that boosts rather than stymies the economy. Howzat?