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Banking Bill

As I mentioned earlier, we have other amendments on the Marshalled List to deal with accountability, and I shall be asking the Minister to answer in more detail how parliamentary accountability can be achieved for those banks that are taken into public ownership. We will come to that in due course. The Minister set out why the temporary public ownership was needed. That is why I did not table a Motion to oppose Clause 9 stand part. In the spirit of good will and letting the Bill go through, we have accepted that temporary public ownership is an appropriate power to have, provided that it means temporary—that was the purpose of my amendment. I accept that it is very difficult to define the period and am conscious that when banks run into trouble, the rump can take a very long time to deal with but, importantly, the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and my noble friends Lord Blackwell and Lord Higgins teased out that the question of intention is important and that the Bill should not be used as a guise to achieve bank nationalisation, to put not too fine a point on it. I will reflect on our debate today, which has been interesting. It would not be right to table an amendment that said that temporary was not indefinite and not permanent; I think that we could do better than that in a way that better reflects intention than the current amendment. It is important that we should address to distinguish the Bill from nationalisation, which should be undertaken on a case-by-case, Bill-by-Bill basis. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment Amendment 7 withdrawn. Clause 3 agreed.