Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Cohen of Pimlico and Lord Flight

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, I rise very much in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. The particular point that I should like to make is that if we look at events over the past five years, it was not derivatives or standard investment banking activity which got the banks into trouble but unwise forms of large-scale lending. It was the purchase of blind CDO instruments from the US without knowing what was in them and the banking practices in particular of HBOS. These were the areas in which huge amounts of money were lost and which nearly brought down two of the main banks of this country.

Looking at the ring-fence model, it seems rather strange that all that sort of activity will be in the same box as good old-fashioned high-street banking, as I understand it. I repeat my interest as a director of Metro Bank, which is an old-fashioned high-street bank in essence. But if the high-risk areas of banking generally are going to be in the same box as the lower-risk activities of high-street banking, that does not seem to make much sense. The delineation of what is investment banking and what is commercial, high-street banking is not a particularly good one if your objective is to protect the ordinary citizens’ banking activities.

[Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)]

My Lords, like many in the House I did not manage to speak at Second Reading either, but I have spent a miserable summer concluding that Vickers got it wrong. This is a horrible thing to say to my good friends in the Parliamentary Commission, but they got it wrong too about separation. I come from a long career in merchant banking. I was pulled out of the Civil Service to be a merchant banker and I understand very well how ingenious they are. We had a wonderful concept in my youth called the Chinese wall. All I can say is that ivy grew over that Chinese wall and ear trumpets went through it because we are an ingenious lot.

The very complication of the debate that we are having, the horrible complication of the legislation and the very real difficulty of the amendments all stem from the fact that we are trying to do something impossible. Ring-fencing will not work. It does not matter how many people you place in charge of it, you need institutional separation. As my noble friend Lord Barnett says, we are going to have to come up against this one of these days.

I am also fairly horrified to hear Members of this House describing ring-fencing as an experiment. What are we doing experimenting with the banking system? We have experimented with it before and we should not. We should be sticking to what we actually know will work.

I am in entire sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I think that his diagnosis is absolutely accurate, but I differ on the conclusion.