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Banking Bill

My Lords, I am happy to say that it is not my amendment, so someone else must address it. Just for once, I leave the noble Viscount’s keen scrutiny of the Bill to the tender mercies of the noble Baroness when she gets her chance to reply. We have already said a lot on the matter of transparency in relation to those parts of the Bill which provide for financial assistance to be made, but I think I need to spell out why the Government are opposed to Amendment 81. We live in extraordinary times and this Bill is intended to deal with the consequences of extraordinary events. Some of the powers in the Bill are, therefore, themselves rather extraordinary. We have had attention drawn to that during the course of the debate this afternoon. The House is of course concerned about the scope of these powers and about the provision for parliamentary control and oversight of their use. The Government would have expected nothing less and we appreciate the importance of responding to these concerns. However, not every power or provision in the Bill is extraordinary. Some are quite ordinary—even routine—and that is true of parts of Clauses 227 and 228, as we have discussed at length in the preceding debates. For example, Clause 227(1) is essentially a standard provision included in all Bills that might involve public expenditure. It gives the proper coverage for the use of the annual Supply Estimates to provide the funds for government departments to carry out their programmes. This provision is to be found in countless Acts of Parliament already on the statute book. And Clause 227(1) attracts all the normal apparatus of Parliamentary control, reporting and accountability for the expenditure concerned. No money, therefore, will be spent on any of the schemes covered by subsection (1)—or for that matter subsection (2)—unless the necessary Estimates have been approved in the normal way by the House of Commons and incorporated in an Appropriation Act or a Consolidated Fund Act, or unless funds have been taken from the Contingencies Fund in line with other long-standing arrangements. Or—and this is where a reference to some non-routine provisions must be made—it has been necessary to use the provisions in subsection (5), which provide the Treasury with direct access to the Consolidated Fund in cases of urgency. But there is more. No funds can be issued from the Consolidated Fund, even after an Estimate has been passed, without the approval of the Comptroller and Auditor-General under the Exchequer and Audit Departments Act 1866. Where Estimates are involved, of course, expenditure will always be fully within normal departmental accounting systems. It will be included in departmental resource accounts and subject to National Audit Office scrutiny and audit. The schemes will be discussed in departmental reports, and scrutinised by departmental select committees and the Public Accounts Committee in another place. All of this apparatus will be attracted routinely and automatically by the departmental spending decisions, by the Estimates and by the statutory cover for those Estimates which Clause 227(1) and (2) provide. As I said a few minutes ago, Clause 228 automatically attracts the normal machinery of parliamentary accountability. The Government do not feel, therefore, that there is any need for additional reporting of the expenditure covered by these clauses which the amendment proposes. Subsection (1)(c) of the proposed new clause opens up the issue of guarantees or any other form of contingent liability, which do not, as I explained in Committee, give rise to any expenditure when they are given. They give rise to expenditure only when they are called. So the normal mechanisms for reporting expenditure, which I have just described, do not bite on guarantees when they are given. This does not mean that they go unreported. Contingent liabilities that are not entered into in the normal course of business are normally reported to Parliament by means of a departmental minute when the commitment is entered into. Of course, some guarantees have to be kept confidential; the established practice is that these are reported in confidence to the chairmen of the Public Accounts Committee and the departmental Select Committee. Contingent liabilities are also reported in the annual departmental resource accounts. There is, of course, full National Audit Office scrutiny and audit in the normal way. I can appreciate why the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, see a need for additional regular reporting of guarantees or similar commitments entered into under Clause 227(1), but this would not, in practice, add much to the arrangements that I have just described and which would continue to apply. I am afraid that this would also be impracticable, when at least some of the guarantees might be large and might have to be kept confidential. The problem is, of course, that if some commitments are kept confidential while others are not, there will inevitably be a mismatch between some published total and the sum of the numbers in the column above, which it would be hard to conceal. There is no way round this problem. I hope that I have persuaded the House that 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, and that the additional reporting arrangements in Clause 227(6) and Clause 227(7), which are now repeated in Clause 228, are suitable for the more unusual things that may happen under these clauses. I noted the strength with which the noble Baroness presented her amendment. I hope that, on reflection, she will accept that the Government have considered these issues and she will feel able to safely withdraw Amendment 81.