---

Banking Bill

My Lords, this amendment takes up the theme of transparency which I shall pursue at various points in the Report stage. It deals with transparency about the use of the special resolution regime and seeks to insert a new clause after Clause 4 requiring the authorities to be transparent. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Howard of Rising moved a more specific amendment which focused on the Treasury presenting a report to Parliament about the way in which the relevant authorities had used their powers under this part. The Minister made his usual defence that lots of information is available to allow Parliament to call the Government and the other relevant authorities to account, and he offered a critique of the precise terms of that amendment. On reflection, it focused too closely on Parliament and allowed the Minister to divert into the mechanisms of parliamentary accountability, most of which, I should point out, look good on paper but are relatively weak in practice. The issue is transparency. Parliament has an interest in what the Executive and public bodies do under the terms of the legislation passed by it, but there is also a big audience in those who are affected by the use of the powers. This clearly covers the financial services industry, but importantly also extends to groups representing consumers and other users of financial services. Here my amendment for Report is less narrow in many ways than the amendment moved in Committee. It is not focused on to whom information should be given and the precise details of that information; rather it sets up a duty on the relevant authorities to, "““make public full and transparent information on a timely basis about their actions and the consequences or likely consequences of their actions””." We cannot define in Parliament exactly what it would be appropriate to reveal in any particular instance of the use of the special resolution regime, but I hope that we can agree on some criteria—transparency, making public, and timeliness. That, I hope, is what the amendment conveys. The Minister may refer, as he did in Committee, to the provision in the code of practice relating to the announcement of actions and an explanation for why the conditions for exercise of the powers were met. There are three points here. First, the code requirement is just that. There is no legal obligation on the authorities to follow it and it can be changed at will by the Government, as we mentioned in an earlier group. Secondly, the code is a backward-looking requirement, while my amendment asks the relevant authorities to address the consequences of their actions and to keep information in the public domain. Thirdly, my amendment does not cease once a decision has been made. It is intended to go beyond the initial action, which is all that the code addresses, and to require ongoing transparency, an aspect on which we would probably not score the existing bank nationalisations highly. I hope that the Minister will be able to embrace transparency and accept my amendment. I beg to move.