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Financial Services Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for giving way, I am grateful too for his conditional apology, and I hope that he will look more closely at this. The point is, however, that in every country the Treasury and the central bank are separate, so what we are talking about is the specific issue of the supervisory and regulatory arrangements for financial institutions. It is a fundamental difference whether you have one or two covering conduct of business and prudential. The noble Lord was kind enough on Second Reading to say that he had put aside my memoirs for rereading. I love the "re"; I am most grateful to him for the "re". If he recalls, I described in my memoirs the White Paper on banking supervision, which I published a quarter of a century ago, in which I indicated how this issue could be strengthened. The one thing it had to be clear about is that prudential supervision and conduct of business regulation are two completely separate activities and it is damaging to put them together.