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Banking Bill

I thank the Minister for that reply, and all other Members of the Committee who have taken part in this relatively short debate. It may have been short, but the importance of the issue has been well set out. I know that all the Minister’s speaking notes are designed to say ““I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment””, and am pleased to see that the Minister has managed to modify that in responding to this one. The Minister referred to the explanations in the code, to which I referred in my introduction. I was aware that the issues were dealt with in the code, which is why I said that we were not far from the Government on this. However, the code has no legal force. It is nice to have, but does not have the same force as something in the Bill. Some things have to be in the Bill. There is an issue of what we mean by ““banking services””. The Minister referred to them in terms of having access to one’s assets. Of course, a conventional banking relationship might have an overdraft. It is just as important to an individual that an overdraft within an agreed limit is not immediately disturbed, because that is just as disturbing to household finances as the removal of a positive balance. The same is true for small businesses; I do not know where you draw the line before getting up to large businesses with large lines of credit and so on. The issue is not just about individuals and positive balances. The examples that the Minister read out from the code were about positive balances, and we must think about this in a broader sense. I heard the Minister say that he would take this away and think about it. I genuinely hope that he will, because it is important to have this issue properly reflected in the Bill in words that everybody feels comfortable with. It is also important to get my earlier point, on whether the FSCS might be overengineered in the absence of a continuity of service objective, positively recorded early in the Bill. I have great pleasure in withdrawing the amendment for today, but we will return to this issue one way or another. Amendment 10 withdrawn.