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Banking Bill

The proposal is open to the usual objection to a statutory instrument; namely, that when the measure is debated, it will not be amendable, whereas it would be if it were in primary legislation. However, I am puzzled by this. It seems that the Minister is arguing for the power to tax by statutory instrument. This has terrible echoes of the policyholder protection arrangements for pensions, whereby levies were made on final salary schemes that led to a further reduction in the number of such schemes. This sounds similar. I understand that the Minister does not want to introduce the measure at the moment, because the people from whom he is raising levies would probably be in the same position as the bank that is supposed to be helped by the contingency fund. Is it proposed that levies made under this arrangement would be deposited in the National Loans Fund? That is the same as general taxation. Do the people contributing to the levy ever get it back? As I understand it, they do not. All that is happening is that a levy is being raised to put money into the National Loans Fund, which may then act—the Government could have done this anyway, out of their own resources—to compensate people under the earlier legislation. This is a strange animal and I hope that the Government will rethink it.