---

Finance Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. I have tried to define "banking institutions" by referring to the Banking Act 2009. I believe that I would thus exclude the building societies and other more mutual, co-operative institutions that I would not regard as being as culpable as the plc-based financial institutions. Irrespective of whether a particular bank received a direct sum from the taxpayer, all those banking institutions benefited from the implicit and implied safety net that the taxpayer provided. Were it not for that underwritten implicit guarantee, banks such as Barclays and others would have been in significant trouble. They may not have taken the handout themselves, but had the markets not felt that the Government of the day were prepared to act were they so requested or had it been necessary to do so, all those banking institutions would have been in an entirely different position.