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Banking Bill (Money)

I had not intended to speak in this debate, but the correct description by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) of the United Kingdom as a large pool of bank debt loosely tied to a medium-sized country was a telling one. He went on to refer to the possibility that our Government, and others in the western world, might be testing to the limit the ability of Governments to raise their own debt. That was also a fair point, which we need to address when we consider these issues. The other place has done us a service in providing us with these amendments. I understand the Government's difficulty in working out how to report to Parliament on an ever-changing and fast-moving situation. Their efforts to do so are set out in their alternative to Lords amendment 83, and I have no quarrel with them, but they must accept that the House cannot wait until the end of the first six-month period set out in their amendment for a comprehensive report on where we have got to. That point was fairly made by the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie). We should not have to wait until October to discover where the state aid reference to Northern Rock—which has paralysed Northern Rock's ability to serve the Government's purpose of opening up new lending—has got to. We should not have to wait until October to work out the extraordinary situation that is now developing with the remnant of Bradford & Bingley—which is still in state ownership—in which the Government will find themselves owning a significant proportion of the outstanding buy-to-let mortgages in this country. That proportion could be in the order of 20 per cent. Through their ownership of Bradford & Bingley, the Government are still observing the terms of the deal that Bradford & Bingley made with GMAC, the American General Motors company that branched out into finance. Many of us have had to deal at constituency level with GMAC-provided mortgages, which are in a sorry state. Bradford & Bingley did a deal in which it undertook to acquire billions of pounds worth of those mortgages on a quarterly basis. The last quarter in which those mortgages will be acquired ends on 31 March 2009, by which time 20 to 25 per cent. of the stock of self-certified mortgages for the self-employed will, through the GMAC acquisition, be in state ownership. The House needs to know where we have got to with all this. We need to know what the immense policy consequences of those deals will be, and what they will mean for public expenditure. In this debate, we have clarified that the Government intend to support UK banks and not other banks. I think that we have also established that the support that the taxpayer is making possible through the working capital fund will go only to UK companies. However, through the guarantee of assets—part of which has already been undertaken, and more of which will be decided at the end of this month with Lloyds and RBS—it is clear that the British taxpayer will be supporting loan books that are not UK-located.