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Banking Bill

The Minister really should not ask me to be charitable. It is not something that comes naturally working in Committee, especially approaching midnight; so charity will not form any part of my decision-making process in relation to the amendment. The Minister explained how the tripartite arrangements are already working effectively, and so on. Such arrangements have been in place since 2000 at least. Had we asked the question at any point along that time continuum, I suspect we would have been told that the tripartite arrangements were working effectively, with meetings at the various levels that the Minister described. Of course there was a disconnect between the Bank’s analysis of what was happening to debt in the economy and what the FSA was doing. There is no question of that. If you look very carefully at the financial stability reports you can find some of that analysis. The financial stability report is put together in a rather academic way. It is not a communication from the Bank saying it believes that leverage ratios and personal debt are too high, or whatever. That is the genesis of needing an additional process and needing it to be public so that the Bank’s views can be put on the record. I agree with the Minister that no part of the correspondence should be firm-specific. That was not the intention of our proposals, which are to deal with issues of macro-analysis and what the FSA’s generic response to that macro-analysis would be. The Minister asks me to withdraw the amendment. As far as I can see, the Government have no proposals to meet this policy-instrument gap that both the governor and the deputy governor have highlighted. We are offering something which we believe would fill that gap and in effect turn the clock back to remedy something that got lost when the FSA took over banking supervision. I will think further about what to do with this before Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 198 withdrawn.