---

Banking Bill

My Lords, there has obviously been extensive discussion on this clause and subsection (3) in particular. I am sorry not to have been able to join in on those discussions. I therefore hesitate to intervene for more than a moment or two. Many years ago, as a Treasury Minister, I introduced something that I described as a technical amendment into a Finance Bill. It turned out that that amendment would have made a considerable number of people retrospectively criminal. I therefore stress that we should be absolutely clear that this clause should not be used to make any amendment to, for example, tax law, which would effectively make people criminals when they were not in the first instance, before retrospective action is taken?