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Banking Bill

I hope that the Minister will give more support to this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Howard, than he did to the questions that I put to him a few weeks ago before the Christmas Recess when he made a Statement about the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. Your Lordships will recall that at that time not only did the Government override the expressed views of the Office of Fair Trading on the matter of competition, with the number of leading banks in this country in effect being reduced from five to four, but they introduced—indeed, they had to introduce in order to deal with the matter—a special statutory instrument to which, in the circumstances of financial instability that the Government were properly drawing to our attention, inevitably we had to agree. At this point, I should say that I did not disagree with that final decision, but what is being asked in the reasonable amendment now before the Committee is that one of the objectives for the special resolution regime should specifically be the attempt to avoid a distortion, loss or restriction of competition. Therefore, I hope that in the longer term, which is what the Bill is concerned with, the avoidance of distortion of competition will be regarded as one of the objectives. It does not mean that that objective will always prevail but at least it will be taken firmly into account and will be required to be taken into account in the different circumstances in the future, about which we can only guess at the moment.