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Reforming Financial Markets

On the last point, I think that most hon. Members agree that we need to toughen up the regulatory system significantly. We need to make changes, but we must not lose sight of the fact that this is an industry that employs over 1 million people in this country, more than half of them outside the south-east of England. It is important that we do not give the impression that we would rather be shot of it, because it is quite important. In the past nine years, it has contributed more than £250 billion in tax revenues—quite a useful sum. When it recovers, I hope that it will continue to make a contribution in the future. The hon. Gentleman asked about selling. If he looks at the White Paper he will see that we make it clear that we will sell when we think that the time is appropriate. We do not have an artificial time scale and we are not under any pressure to sell, but it will not have escaped his notice that just at the moment the shares in the two banks that we own are worth slightly less than we paid for them. He therefore need have no fear of being confronted with a quick sale: we will do what is right to achieve the best value for the taxpayer. On lending, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is important to try to get credit flowing in the economy again. That is a key part of what we are doing. Mortgage lending and the availability of lending for mortgages have increased but more needs to be done in certain sectors of business lending, such as to small and medium-sized enterprises, and especially to the medium-sized ones. For example, I welcome today's announcement by Prudential of a fund worth £1.5 billion specifically geared to medium-sized companies. That is an example of a non-bank bringing together pension funds, local authorities and its own funds to make money directly available to medium-sized firms, and it is a useful step in the right direction. The hon. Gentleman made some broader points, and one of them had to do with the "too big to fail" argument. I understand where he is coming from, but I said in my statement that we must take into account the cost to the taxpayer as well as the wider effects of failure, and that we must regulate accordingly. However, there is a flaw in his argument—I heard him being asked about this on the "Today" programme at 10 past 7—and it is that he seems to back off from the consequences of telling a large bank that it is too big. In response to that, the bank might say, "We're too big, so we'll go somewhere else." Alternatively, dividing such a bank into lots of different companies, as was the case with Lehman Brothers, does not solve the problem. When Lehman Brothers went down, the whole shooting match went down, not just one aspect of it. The hon. Gentleman made a wider point about macro-prudential supervision. In my statement, I said that given what central banks do, and what the Bank of England in particular does, I anticipated that such supervision would have a wider role, as we work through the present circumstances. The Bank of England is the obvious place for it, but I come back to the point that I made to the shadow Chancellor: wherever the lines of responsibility are drawn, we need a regulator who is able to look at the wider prudential supervision of the system, and the wider financial stability. We also need a regulator who will drill down to the nuts and bolts of every single company. Whether people like it or not, there is no country in the world whose treasury does not have to be at the table. We know all to clearly that either the law has to be changed or there is a fiscal cost, so three people have to sit around the table regardless of how the regulatory cake is divided. That is something that the shadow Chancellor will not face up to.