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Banking Bill

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his answer. My mind naturally returns to the many occasions on which the late Lord Dormand tried again and again, almost weekly, to put before your Lordships the scandal of remuneration being extorted from companies and banks by directors and other highly paid executives. If my noble friend is not happy that the amendment is aimed only at directors and he has other people in mind, I have already said that he has the draftsmen at his elbow to put forward a new clause in an amendment to cover those aspects which he has hinted at and to which he spoke in Committee. Then, he said that he knew that there were people earning 20, 30 or 40 times what directors sometimes earn in banks. If he wants those people to come within the scope of the clause, I shall be the first to vote for it, as I hope will the rest of your Lordships. As for the question of independence, it was that which made me think of Lord Dormand, who got such poor answers from Government after Government, including this one, when he put the matter to this House in Question after Question. He was told that it would interfere with the independence of companies and banks. At the time, he mainly asked about companies and was told that fixing the remuneration of directors would prevent them being independent. In Committee, my noble friend Lady Ford made a similar point in different words, which I carefully studied before helping to draft this amendment. It is an argument of despair to say that we can do nothing. I understand the Front-Bench position put to us by my noble friend to be, ““Yes, of course it is a scandal but we cannot do anything about it by regulation because that would interfere with the independence of the whole operation””. Either this is a Government, an institution, who are here to put the public interest into legislation or they are an institution in thrall to the institutions that they fear to control. Regulation does not have frontiers set by natural law; it has frontiers set by men and women who are bankers or legislators and who choose where the frontier of regulation will stop. If in this instance this Government choose the frontier of regulation to stop at the walls of the Bank, then on their head be it when the resentment to which I have referred grows stronger and stronger among working people, who see the results of such choices in their very livelihoods. I promise the Minister that I shall not come back to this matter; I have no opportunity to do so. However, I will leave it only on condition that he thinks again about the consequences to which I have referred. He plays a major and vital part in financial affairs for this Government. That is why he sits where he sits, and that is what he must think about as a consequence of the Government’s next electoral liabilities. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 20 withdrawn. Clause 22: Termination rights, &c. Amendments 21 to 23 not moved.