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Banking Bill

I hear what the Minister says, but I shall take him back to my example of IT services. If one has arm’s-length IT service provision, because the service provider has to gear up in hardware, software and people, it is usually the case that those contracts, if they are on arm’s-length terms, contain terms dealing with duration and termination, because termination means that there are some dead costs often left behind and/or that there are excess facilities. We are not necessarily talking about tradable services; I understand that the continuity provisions are about bespoke services much more than about tradable services. You can go out and get a new provider for tradable services—for example, office cleaning—but these services tend to be interwoven and specific. If you had outsourced them—if, instead of a group company providing them, there was an outsourced provider—that contract would almost certainly have provisions covering termination, or certainly termination ahead of the anticipated term. That was the issue that I was seeking to probe and the Minister did not quite answer that aspect of it for me.