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Banking Bill

I have sympathy with the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, not just for equity reasons, but because, if there is speculation that a bank might be taken into the special resolution regime, it is important that people do not close down positions in advance, thereby precipitating a need to take action. Is the Minister saying that it would be appropriate to compensate counterparties as if the alternative was that nothing had happened and that the bank had continued trading? Presumably in many cases, the Government are intervening only because the alternative would be that the bank goes into insolvency. Clearly, when a bank goes into insolvency, there are procedures by which counterparties can settle their claims legally. One would not want them to get more compensation from the Government than they would in the alternative situation. If one accepts this principle, is there a way of wording this that would require the Government to compensate counterparties only if they could make a case that they were put in a worse position by the Government’s action than they would have been by an insolvency action?