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Banking Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. The more one looks at the code, the more one realises how substantive it is. Take, for example, the objectives of a bridge bank. If you read the Bill, you would not have the faintest clue why you needed a bridge bank in addition to the full nationalisation option. However, the code makes it absolutely clear: it says that it is intended to be a short-term operation and that its primary objective is to facilitate the sale of the bank. It seems to me that either of those things could equally well have been put in the Bill from the start. As the noble Baroness said, the fact that they are in the code now does not necessarily guarantee that they will be in the code for ever, because it can be changed at any point. The Minister said earlier that the code has been scrutinised in Parliament. We have scrutinised it in Parliament to a certain extent but equally, as the noble Baroness said, new sections of the code are as yet unwritten. Even when the full first version has been completed, there will be every opportunity for the code to be amended in future. The negative resolution procedure is a very limited form of parliamentary scrutiny but it is better than nothing. On that basis, I support the amendment.