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Finance (No. 3) Bill

It is difficult to see how the Government thought that that would be the moment of catharsis—the moment when everybody said, ““Yes, aren't the banks doing their just bit? They're now completely free from their obligations to the taxpayer.”” Project Merlin clearly did not achieve that. The Chancellor made some tweaks to the negotiations on the Project Merlin arrangements—he did so in February, on the day of Treasury questions—and he then tweaked the rate again in the March Budget, after criticisms of the big corporation tax cut that the banks will enjoy. However, the bank levy is set at a relatively low rate, especially when we look at what is happening in France, Hungary, Portugal or Austria. Indeed, we even read in today's Financial Times about the quasi-bank levy arrangements pursued by the Dutch Government. In future years, the Government should increase the bank levy to ensure that the banks continue to pay their fair share of tax and so that taxpayers are not left picking up the bill for the crisis caused by the irresponsible actions that the banks pursued. That is why in May we called for the Government to review the bank levy and to publish a report of the analysis behind the rates that they had set and the thresholds that they had chosen. They refused to do that; however, as we have seen, they are now refusing even to review the possibility of repeating the bank bonus tax. Why has the Chancellor failed to take action on excessive executive banker bonuses? At first, the coalition agreement suggested that the Government might well do something about this. It promised to"““bring forward detailed proposals for robust action to tackle unacceptable bonuses in the financial services sector; in developing these proposals, we will ensure they are effective in reducing risk.””" That is on page 9; it is one of the first things that the coalition put into its agreement. The Business Secretary recently described the bankers' bonuses paid for this year as ““offensive””, yet the Government could not even promote proper transparency on bonuses and remuneration, never mind taking action to ensure that they were fair and reasonable. The most that the Government could extract voluntarily from the banks was an agreement in Project Merlin to report anonymously on the total remuneration of the five highest-paid bank senior executives outside the board. The Government are not even forcing the banks to disclose all the bonuses over £1 million, which was a key recommendation of the Walker review. That would have been easy to implement, given that it was part of Labour's own legislation. The provision is on the statute book, ready to be triggered. The Government's excuse for inaction is apparently that they are trying to get other countries to sign up to the transparency arrangements, but we have seen absolutely no evidence of any attempt to secure such an agreement. In a written parliamentary question in June, I asked the Minister"““what meetings he has had with his EU counterparts to discuss disclosure by banks of the number of employees paid salary and bonuses of more than £1 million per year.””" He replied:"““Treasury Ministers and officials have meetings with a wide variety of organisations in the public and private sectors as part of the process of policy development and delivery.””—[Official Report, 15 June 2011; Vol. 529, c. 801W.]" My hon. Friends will be used to getting that kind of answer to written questions. We must therefore take it that there have been no meetings whatever with the Minister's European counterparts to get agreement on transparency on bonuses—[Interruption.] If he has had such meetings, I would be delighted if he would stand up and inform the House of the progress that has been made. It does not sound as though he has talked to a single one of his counterparts about this issue, however. Bonuses remain staggeringly high, and the Government must say why they are scared of transparency.