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Financial Services Bill

My Lords, the Minister gets ever more ingenious in his defence of the nonsense that is in the Bill. The Government are trying to pretend that the Council for Financial Stability means something and then, all of a sudden, it is the Treasury that takes the lead on drafting and produces the report. That is not covered by Clause 3, which states that the Treasury must prepare a report and include matters which in the opinion of the Treasury are significant. We are told that the really important sanction is that the Governor and the chairman of the FSA can have minuted the fact that they do not like what is in the report. This is worse than fantasy: it does not have coherence or logic; it is plain that this is a body which fulfils a Treasury civil servant’s idea of what it will be like in practice to have three important people working together. I shall not take any more of the Committee’s time today. The points raised by my noble friends Lord Northbrook and Lord Howard of Rising are entirely to the point. We have not heard a single bit of sense from the Minister in his defence of the Treasury taking the lead and deciding what goes into the annual report of the council, other than to underline that the council is a piece of nonsense. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 22 withdrawn. Amendment 23 not moved. Amendment 24 Moved by