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Banking Bill

My Lords, the amendment concerns transparency in payments from the National Loans Fund. Transparency about some of the powers provided in the clauses has been the subject of a great deal of debate both in Committee and today. We undertook in Committee to look at points made and reflect further. The amendment is our response to those Committee debates. I shall have a little more to say on the subject of transparency in general when we come to Amendment 81, and why the Government believe it to be unnecessary, but let me concentrate first on the merits of the government amendment. It is important to understand that the financial provisions in Clauses 227 and 228 fulfil a largely routine function in providing statutory cover for public expenditure. One consequence is that they automatically attract the standard arrangements for control, reporting and accounting of public expenditure. Clause 227 attracts those mechanisms that apply to expenditure from the Consolidated Fund, whether voted in Estimates or taken directly as a standing service. Clause 228 automatically attracts the normal machinery for the control, reporting and accounting for payments from the National Loans Fund. For example, no expenditure on loans may be paid out of the National Loans Fund without the approval of the Comptroller and Auditor-General under the National Loans Act 1968. All loans from the National Loans Fund are included in the annual accounts of the fund. The National Loans Fund can only make loans, so Clause 228 could never replace the emergency provisions in Clause 227(5), but it serves a similar purpose in that loans can also be made from Votes—provided, of course, that the necessary Estimates cover has been obtained, or that the resources can be taken from the Contingencies Fund. So the Government felt, on reflection, that the same kind of reporting arrangements as apply for the urgent payments under Clause 227(5) should be made for individual emergency loans under Clause 228. Amendment 80 does that with the same kind of anonymity and public interest conditions as Clauses 227(6) and (7) provide. There are already in place well-established arrangements for accounting and reporting which will cope with most of what may happen under Clauses 227 and 228 in the normal way. The additional reporting arrangements that the Government now propose will ensure that emergency payments from the National Loans Fund will have the same reporting arrangements as those that Clause 227 provides for emergency payments, direct from the Consolidated Fund. Accordingly, I beg to move. Amendment 80 agreed.