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Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

The Chief Secretary has just made the extraordinary assertion that reducing the period to a month would place the Government under an unreasonable constraint in terms of laying these orders. We were led to believe that this was a matter of great emergency that had to be dealt with today and that legislation had to be completed by the end of the week. If I have misunderstood, perhaps she will correct me. I was expecting that the order, a draft of which we have seen, would be laid within a matter of days, at the most, of the Bill completing its parliamentary passage. If that is wrong, hon. Members ought to be made aware of the fact. She has not made any case for providing for a period of longer than one month. She has certainly not made a case for providing for a year. Had she made a convincing case for providing for a three-month or two-month period, Conservative Members would have been prepared to listen to that and to any assurances that she wanted to offer us about introducing such proposals at a later stage.