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Economy: Regulators (Regulators Committee Report)

My Lords, noble Lords would not thank me for detaining them at a time when they are anxious for the House to rise so that they can leave for a couple of weeks, so I will not do that. The classic job of the mover of the Motion in winding up is to defend the report and the committee’s work. I do not need to do that as there has been no attack on them. Indeed, some speakers, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, have gone quite a long way in the opposite direction of praising us and our work. I am not and was not saying that we did not do a decent job in the circumstances that we faced. On the whole, we got the right evidence for the time and assessed and reported on it properly. That was not my complaint. Rather, my complaint was purely selfish. I would have had even more fun—because I enjoyed doing it—if I had been able to produce a report that had taken into account the events of the subsequent six months. Let me thank, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera, for going just a little bit beyond her brief in her support for a sessional or Joint Committee. She is quite right. Her lines to take were, of course, correct, but she showed some personal understanding of the need for this work and I am grateful to her for that. Let me also thank her for what she said about ministerial responsibility and the need for better co-ordination, because this is a cross-governmental issue. We do not want more bureaucracy in government but we want this issue to be taken with the seriousness that it deserves, which cannot be done on a piecemeal basis by departmental Select Committees. Let me make it clear that, although I have criticised particular failures of financial regulation—I am doing no more than the FSA did itself, after all—it is not my assertion that the financial regulation system or the regulatory system is broken as a whole. I believe that there have been cracks and it is important to put those things right. My complaint was that the financial markets were at fault; that should have been seen by a lot of people much earlier than it was. I am a great believer in anti-aphorisms; as Bernard Shaw said, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. He was referring, I think, to amateur piano-playing. My anti-aphorism here is that a trouble shared is a trouble doubled; in other words, if you spread the risk, as the Bank of England said a year ago, you lose clarity about who is responsible and you create new risks rather than eliminate them. We have had a terrible lesson in that in the past few months. I rely on the regulatory state in this country to improve the protection that the people of this country have a right to expect against such abuse. I have one bit of thanks; that is, to thank the noble Lords, Lord MacGregor, Lord Norton and Lord Ramsbotham, for taking the chair for a period in which I was having a heart operation. They performed the role marvellously well and I am very grateful to them. On Question, Motion agreed to.