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Banking Bill

We are having a semantic debate about ““temporary””, but it seems to be based on an assumption that there is an entity which is taken into the public sector, and that there is an entity which is ultimately returned to the private sector. That may not be the case at all. You could take a bank into public ownership, and the bank could be broken up into different pieces, from different assets at different times, and different liabilities could be disposed of. You may end up with a husk of the name of Northern Rock remaining in the bank’s ownership for years, but effectively it would have been disposed of. I do not think that there is an entity to which one can apply the term ““temporary””. You take something into public ownership and deal with it, which is not simply limited to the option of selling the entity that you bought in the first place. I am rather with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that temporary probably has not much relevance as you cannot define the object to which it applies.