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Regulatory and Banking Reform

I hear the right hon. Gentleman's request, and his right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) has made a similar request, to which he did not seem to accede when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The new regulatory regime does learn the lessons of the past, and the supervisory style and confused mandate of the FSA mean that we need to change. The lesson that we have learned from the financial crisis is that, importantly, the Bank of England's expertise in market surveillance and in understanding macro-prudential trends can best work with the needs of a micro-prudential supervisor by ensuring that that micro-prudential supervisor is an independent subsidiary of the Bank. And, just so the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) does not get the wrong impression, I did not work on the audit of BCCI.