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Banking Bill

I thank the Minister for his response to the amendments. I will not get into whether or not the affirmative procedure is the best way of scrutinising a contingency funding arrangement if one is ever introduced. Let me just say for the time being that we do not think that it is. This is a banking Bill that is being introduced in response to what has happened in banking. It is not an opportunity for the Government to completely rewrite the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which is what they are doing. In so doing, under the guise of flexibility, they are exposing all kinds of financial services providers to the risk that the way in which pre-funding is introduced will operate adversely to them. That is what they are concerned about and they do not see why any of these changes should affect them. A case has not been made for pre-funding for insurance or even for banking, as has been strongly put forward by a number of individual and collective players in the banking industry. We know that the FSA and the Bank of England want to do this because they are on record as saying so. For the Minister to say that this is not the right time is disingenuous because we know that those parties will be waiting for the first lull in which to get it introduced. But we can debate that later. For these purposes, if it is going to be introduced, it should be introduced for banks and building societies because that is where the problem that has led to this Bill has come from and not anything else. The Minister said at one stage that the problem with one of my amendments is that the banks and building societies might be treated separately. Perhaps they should be treated separately as the risk profile of banks and building societies is inevitably quite different given the different funding powers that they have, for example. We will not get much further on the amendment tonight. I shall leave it by saying that I am wholly unconvinced by what the Minister has said in connection with this clause. We have a long way to go in our debates in Committee on the Financial Services Compensation Scheme and contingency funding, in particular, and I shall save further comments for later groups of amendments. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 158B withdrawn.