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Banking Bill

I accept the clarification that on European rights we can use the Act to litigate in the UK, but I am not sure what effect that would have. The Minister refers to abject failure, but not all cases will be abject failure and not all individuals will abjectly fail. The point is that they are being denied the normal route of asserting their rights or of having them not accepted, with the Treasury or the Bank of England just saying their opinion. That causes me huge concern. I was minded to divide the Committee on this issue, but I shall reflect further on the availability of remedies under the Human Rights Act. I accept that ultimately it is an issue of whether the Treasury and the Bank of England act reasonably or proportionately. I am deeply concerned that it is found necessary to have this little warfare against directors of banks. In most ordinary circumstances the law would allow them to achieve effectively what they want in the bad cases and by agreement as may have been reached. This seems to be a bit of public posturing against directors. I am not here to defend all bank directors because many of them have not behaved responsibly or honourably in all cases. But I believe that, given these very wide powers which would allow on the basis of Clause 7 the triggering of the special resolution regime on not necessarily serious grounds and certainly not transparent grounds, we might be into using Clause 20 in circumstances that the ordinary law would not approve or support, but which the Treasury could use for its own purposes. I shall think about this again before Report and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 37 withdrawn.