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Northern Rock

My Lords, on the noble Lord’s final point, I certainly assure him that that is to be the case. However, when he says that there ought to be an orderly sell-off, he means a fire sale of the assets at the worst possible time, and therefore very significant losses indeed. I hear what the noble Lord says about the ease and facility with which Johnson Matthey was tackled some 20 years ago. That was rather a different situation from a bank occupying this position, particularly as the issue confronting the Chancellor and the Government in the middle of last year was the anxiety of depositors about their deposits, to the extent that there was a developing run on the bank with a capacity for the contagion to spread more widely than that. Immediate government action was necessary and taken at that time. If the noble Lord suggests that a fire sale of the assets at that time, the sacking of 6,500 workers and the destruction of a great deal of the economy of the north-east of England would have had no consequences in the difficult times of last year, he is living in a different economic circumstance from the rest of us. The simple fact of the matter is that what was happening in the United States at that time was subsequently to affect France, Germany and elsewhere. There were real threats to the banking system, in which there were major catastrophes and casualties. The Government had a bounden duty to limit that contagion to one institution. That is what we set out to do, and we are setting out to guarantee that the sums which the Government have put into the bank are returned to the taxpayer in due course.