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Banking Bill

I thank my noble friend Lord Northbrook for his contribution and I thank the Minister for his reply. It will not surprise the Minister to hear that I found his response disappointing. It seems to me that it is not sufficient simply to say that the Treasury can be asked for information by Parliament at any time—although the mechanisms for that are quite difficult to tease out—and that nothing needs to be provided in statute. If the Bill were setting up a body, there would be no question but that we would draft into it quite extensive accountability arrangements, including an annual report, annual accounts and the ability of the Secretary of State to direct the organisation to provide whatever information he or the Treasury desired. In my experience, the Treasury insists that those provisions are put into Bills produced by other departments because they are an important element of the financial accountability of those bodies. However, when we get to the Bill that the Treasury writes for itself, it tears all that up. The Treasury will just provide whatever Parliament chooses to get out of it if it can find a mechanism for doing so, or Parliament will get the Chancellor to report ““as and when appropriate””, to use the words in the code of practice. That does not seem appropriate for bodies which are not just in public ownership for a few months. Let us not kid ourselves—we had a debate on temporary public ownership on our first day in Committee—we are talking about significant periods of time and significant organisations with large amounts of public money invested in or standing behind them. This Bill, almost uniquely among statutes, creates no accountability arrangements, except the very barest that are found in Clause 80 in relation to bridge banks. I cannot begin to say how pretty unacceptable the Minister’s answer was. I said that it was a probing amendment because on its own it is nothing like good enough to deal with the accountability requirements that come out of this Bill and the hangover from the actions taken under the Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008. I believe that all those need to be dealt with. As it is a probing amendment I will not divide the House, but I will look at it again and will probably bring back a more comprehensive amendment reflecting a proper approach to parliamentary accountability that the Treasury might expect of other departments in a similar circumstance. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 35 withdrawn. Clause 13 agreed. Clauses 14 to 16 agreed.