Bank of England and Financial Services Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Tunnicliffe

Monday 9th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Eatwell for this amendment, which takes us to the central problem with the Bill. His words are powerful: he calls the Bill opaque and obscure, and he says that it leaves unclear who makes policy. I thank him for his review of the previous legislation and his assurance that, broadly speaking, it works. I thank him for the concept of an “active entity”, which I shall adopt. However, he comes back to the point: who is doing what?

Perhaps before I go on, I should explain where the Opposition stand on the Bill. We feel that the role of the Bank of England is quite central to the economy and that it needs to be reviewed and probably reformed. We believe that, to do that, we have to have a period of reflection and study. My noble friend the Shadow Chancellor in another place has announced those reviews. Nevertheless, in respect of this Bill, we have a role to review the Bill, ensure that it makes sense and do all that we can to help the Government bring it back to a more sensible position.

Like my noble friend, having read the Bill, I ended up feeling that I understood less about how the Bank works than I did when we were in the very painful position in 2012—I say painful because it took so long to get there—when we created the legislation that created the present situation. Largely speaking, there is a question around why we are changing it from something that is clear to something that is significantly less clear. I thank the Minister for all his help in trying to help me understand the Bill—I wish that he had had more success. I am very grateful for the consolidated document that his staff have produced, and that has made studying the Bill and the Acts that it affects so much more straightforward. I also thank the Minister for the meetings he arranged, with himself and with the chairman of the court.

Those two meetings had an interesting effect: they produced two letters. One was dated 4 November and the other was dated November; noble Lords will have to take my word for it that it came after 4 November. I will quote selectively from the letters and am very happy to circulate them to anybody who is interested. Under a large paragraph labelled “Court of Directors and Financial Stability Strategy”, the Minister says:

“The Court, as the governing body of the Bank, is responsible for managing the Bank’s affairs except for the formulation of monetary policy. The Court is also responsible for determining the Bank’s objectives and strategy, and, in line with the Court’s role overseeing the Bank, the Bill makes the Court responsible for the oversight functions. The Court is therefore ultimately responsible for deciding how power given to ‘the Bank’ should be exercised, and how duties given to ‘the Bank’ should be fulfilled. This includes the Bank’s recovery and resolution powers”.

When I read that, I thought that it was pretty straightforward and sounded like any other company: power rests with the board—we happen to call it “the court”—except for where it is either taken out by statute, which it clearly is in the formation of monetary policy, or where the court has decided to delegate that power.

Unfortunately, after I met the chairman of the court, I got another, shorter letter. Under a paragraph labelled “Powers and duties conferred on the Bank”, it said:

“As the governing body of the Bank, the court is responsible for deciding how powers given to the Bank should be exercised and ensuring that the Bank fulfils its duties”.

That sounds okay. It then goes on to say that:

“These include powers and duties in relation to note issuance, resolution, and supervision of financial market infrastructures”.

It does not quite say that it shall have no other duties, but I put it to noble Lords that they are a pretty thin number of duties, given the tremendous responsibility that the Bank has in our monetary affairs. In the next paragraph, under the heading, “Powers and duties conferred on statutory committees”, the letter states:

“Powers and duties conferred on a statutory committee are for that committee to exercise, according to the terms of their legislation. The Court cannot exercise the powers conferred on a statutory committee”.

Because there was no legislation passed between 4 November and the something of November, I assume that the two letters say the same thing; I just have a lot of trouble seeing how. If the first letter is right, as I read it, then I am relatively comfortable. Unlike the Bill—and we can clear that up with some amendments—it restates my understanding that the court is in charge, except where responsibility is taken out by legislation. The second letter rather implies that there are four entities in the Bank: the Financial Policy Committee, the Monetary Policy Committee and the Prudential Regulation Committee—I think I have got them roughly right—which have clear powers and lots of authority and are all, incidentally, chaired by the governor; and then there is something called “the Bank”, which is left with note issuance, resolution and supervising infrastructure. We all know that no committee is going to have much to do in a resolution situation, since it will happen over a weekend in 48 hours We have moved from a position where the court is central to the Bank to one where it seems almost irrelevant.

There are two points here. First, is that move the Government’s intention and, secondly, is it clear? We are going to worry elsewhere about the standards for senior management in banks. If a bank came along with its roles and responsibilities as obscurely set out as we now have in the proposed legislation, it would be denied a licence to operate. What are we asking from these organisations? It is absolute clarity of who does what, with what authority. This does not meet those standards and it would not get a licence. I hope the Minister will ponder on what my noble friend, Lord Eatwell, and I have said. If he agrees that the Bill produces more obscurity than light, I hope he will pause and bring forward some amendments on Report, first to make absolutely clear what the Bill does.

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, when the Bill was published, I wrote to the Economic Secretary to the Treasury on this territory, because I could not really understand how the reorganisation of the Bank was intended to operate, or what it intended to achieve. Part of the reply I got was:

“The Governor has said that: ‘Our strategy will be to conduct supervision as an integrated part of the central bank and not as a standalone supervisory agency that happens to be attached to a central bank’. De-subsidiarisation, together with the organisational changes being put in place by the Bank as part of its ‘One Bank’ strategy, is an important element of this, and will help to break down any remaining barriers that could stand in the way of a unified culture and impede flexible and coordinated working across the Bank”.

I thought about this and looked at the structure. In answer to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, what struck me was that “the Bank” actually means “the Governor”.

Banking Act 2009 (Restriction of Special Bail-in Provision, etc.) Order 2014

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Tunnicliffe

Monday 15th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, I would just like to put on record some concerns about the bail-in arrangements and what they are broadcast as achieving.

My first point is that, as the CEO of the Association of Corporate Treasurers recently said to the Lords EU Economic and Financial Affairs Sub-Committee, once there is any whiff of concern about a bank, any company will withdraw its deposits immediately. It is not going to hang around and wait for the bank to be subject to a bail-in. One thing that the bail-in arrangements do is actually accelerate the possibility of runs on banks. It will not be just corporate deposits; any form of lending to a bank will be subject to bail-in. If there is any whiff of trouble about that bank, that money will be withdrawn as soon as possible.

The second point, which perhaps has not been learnt from the recent banking crisis, is that the key thing that hugely accelerated the downturn in the economy in 2009 was allowing the money stock and the money supply to contract substantially, just as happened in America in the 1930s. If you are going to do a bail-in on a bank and its capital is going to get exhausted, it will have to contract its balance sheet dramatically, all other things being equal. While I note the comment that the Bank of England will come in and help, effectively it would have to be the state that came in and recapitalised banks or, again, the result would be a massive contraction of the money supply if any of the major banks were in trouble and thus required bail-in. Unless that happened, again, it would have the knock-on effect of a major economic contraction.

The bail-in arrangements make sense—we know what they want to achieve, which is to eliminate or at least reduce the extent to which the taxpayer has to bail out banks in a crisis—but people are kidding themselves if they believe that it is as simple as that. Fundamentally, even as a result of how the bail-in arrangements operate, unless the Government are there to replenish capital—whether they do so as the Bank of England or directly—you would have a huge monetary contraction, which would be damaging to the economy.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be in Grand Committee again—and its packed rows—to address some affirmative orders. I thank the Minister for setting out the orders and indicate, as a generality, that the Official Opposition welcome the ideas behind the various Acts and the orders that make them operational. I will not make a contribution on the individual orders, but just a few comments about the concepts that are swept up in the orders, taken together.

I put on record my thanks to Catherine McCloskey, who was unfortunate enough to have her telephone number beside her name in the Explanatory Memorandum. Although I have sat through most of these banking debates and participated modestly in some of the amendments, I have to say that if you are not continuously involved with this, the whole shape of this legislation is impossible to retain in one’s mind. As a result of her tutelage, I think I have a reasonable view of the shape of the legislation and the orders and that I can claim that the Opposition have done their duty in probing the overall direction of the legislation and the effectiveness of the orders in bringing that legislation into effect.

However, I have some comments. As I understand them, the orders give effect to the BRRD and refine it for the UK environment—a sort of merging of our thinking and the thinking behind the directive. Everything becomes effective from 1 January next year, which strikes me as a good piece of clarity. As I recall, it was originally envisaged that there would be a period of British-only rules and then European rules, and so on. I commend the Government on meeting those timetables.

Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Tunnicliffe

Monday 16th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, following on from what the noble Lord has just said, I would have thought that recent history suggested that regulators were not particularly good at being the bodies finding out the bad eggs in banking institutions. Most of the staff of the PRA have come from the FSA. They were the regulators for the period during which the banking system in this country took on board the awful problem of a lack of integrity.

There is agreement across the House and the country that the question is: how do we get integrity back into our banking system? I do not see that rules are going to do it. We should have focused more on the role of the shareholders of banks in making sure that their boards and executives are proper people, and on the role of the auditors in this area, but I do not see any sound basis for being of the opinion that the regulators are going to be much good at it.

I broadly support the concept of licensing, although I agree with the point: what is in a word? It seems to me that you can license people in regard to their academic qualifications and job experience but not for integrity. People have either got integrity or they have not. We want to get to a situation where the managers of our banks have got integrity and give key effort to making sure that their banks are run with integrity.

That leads me to the next big area. My view over 40 years in the City has been that the main cause of this trouble has been that an oligopoly was allowed to develop. If one looks at economic history, wherever there have been cartels and oligopolies, there has always been bad practice. One reason that the oligopoly got worse is that there was a mistaken view back in the 1980s after the failure of Johnson Matthey that led to the doctrine that the lender of last resort only stood behind banks that were too big to fail. That led to a shrinkage of the number of banks. Many, because they were not deemed to be covered by the lender-of-last-resort doctrine, were closed down.

I remember having extensive discussions and correspondence with the late Sir Eddie George on just that issue back in the early 1990s. What was allowed to happen was a moral hazard. The oligopoly was there with its ticket that it had lender-of-last-resort support and it took the view, “Make money in any way you like and pay the fines”—they were a natural cost of business if you were in breach. That led to a complete deterioration of the standards of integrity in the banking system. That is the truth of what I observed.

I repeat, I personally do not see the regulator as being a huge force in turning round integrity. Punishing those that basically act immorally is quite an important ingredient, but above all we need to get sound management into banks. Maybe the regulator has some role in helping that process, but bank managers must run their banks on the basis of integrity. How far down does the regulator go if he is responsible for ensuring that staff have integrity? It seems to me that this would not work.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Flight, on his ongoing campaign for small banks and more diversity—not that I dissent from it, but it is consistent. What I have more trouble with is the concept of competence and integrity in the banking system, and the idea that somehow we should more readily trust the banks than the regulator. The banks have not got much of a record over the past three or four years in terms of either competence or, frankly, integrity. There is virtually no major bank that has not shown some errors in terms of integrity or shown some failure in competence or ripped off customers through mis-selling. The poor FSA might not have done brilliantly, but it did investigate these areas and produce perfectly sensible reports. As far as one can see, the FCA has got off to a good start. It is producing good and competent reports. I want to express my belief that the regulator is doing, and will continue to do, a good job.

The amendment is quite rightly interpreted as saying, “The regulator shall do”. If our amendment were to succeed, I could readily see some drawing back from that. My own experience in the airline industry is that the regulator creates the framework and checks the checkers—in other words, checks the senior management—but that the spreading of annual testing and so on goes into the companies in a trusting framework. There are ways of doing it without having thousands of inspectors around. Our general thrust is in the right direction. However, I get a sense from what is happening in the House tonight that the chances of me persuading people on this point are slim, so I will not press this to a Division. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Tunnicliffe

Monday 15th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, Amendment 187TE, in the name of my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, is essentially about the quality of information and its provision. To put it in context, I should like to go back to the purpose of the Bill. I put to the House that its purpose is to prevent or mitigate a crisis in the financial services industry. The crisis from 2007 to 2009 came from the selling of subprime mortgages principally in the US. As we know, these mortgages were repackaged and moved down the line. Eventually, they ended up on the balance sheet of what one would have thought at the time were highly sensible banks of great stature and stability.

How did that happen? It happened because of the malicious intent of the original designers of these products and the people who designed the various packages to disguise the essential weakness that they contained. But when you read the various reports about the crisis, there is no question that a fundamental part of this crisis was caused by the poor knowledge and information that passed through the system. In a sense, the poor knowledge was in two places. It was within the firms, and between the firm and the regulator. In particular, the FSA’s report on the RBS brings this out well. Essentially, parts of RBS simply were not effectively communicating with each other.

[Lord Flight]

Perhaps I may add that in my estimate the US also wiped off about $1,000 billion of its overseas debt as a result of the failure of subprime mortgages.

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

As a great admirer of the US, I would never underestimate its ingenuity but I did not realise that that had been a principal objective. I thank the noble Lord for my improved education. Returning to my speech, the failure in RBS in particular was once again an internal management problem. The refreshingly honest report of the FSA brings that out but it goes on to criticise its own performance as a regulator. It criticises various ways in which it behaved and its allocation of resources but it also criticises the information that it was able to get during the crisis. That was because firms were unable to provide information that was sufficiently accurate, comprehensible and timely.

The Joint Committee on this Bill took a considerable interest in the whole matter of information and pointed out that in the US the,

“Dodd-Frank Act created the Office for Financial Research which was given responsibility for monitoring of systemic financial risks and, in order to undertake this task, has been given powers for the setting of data standards for the industry. In order to allow effective monitoring of systemic financial risk, the Dodd-Frank Act also requires that OTC derivative contracts are recorded in trade repositories, a step that requires standardisation of reporting across the industry”.

The recommendation from the Joint Committee, which the Government effectively rejected, was:

“The Bill should be amended to place a duty on the Bank of England (or its subsidiary the PRA) to develop information standards for the UK financial services industry and to report regularly on progress in improving these information standards in order to support financial stability”.

This amendment does its best to give effect to that recommendation.

In researching the background to this amendment, I looked over a number of areas but perhaps the most inspirational thing I came across was a speech by Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England, at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, “Building a Global Legal Entity Identifier Framework” symposium in New York on 14 March. That is a long introduction but it was called simply “Towards a common financial language”. He contended that a common financial language would improve risk management in firms because of better flows and understanding of information; improve risk management across firms; map the network of financial transactions; and, shock-horror, lower barriers to entry. He pointed out that the information standards and information systems within the industry are probably 10 or 20 years behind those in other industries, and particularly the major distribution industries.

We put forward this amendment and it will no doubt be countered by the noble Lord saying, “Well, they can do this anyway”. We are trying to say something different. We are trying to say that this is not just an enabler but a doer. It is a requirement not just that the PRA has the ability to take a positive role in the matter of information and information standards, but requires it to take a role. It is quite long so I will not go through it in any detail but it requires the PRA to require firms to report; it requires them to set standards in the manner in which they report; it requires that they should have sufficient resources to be able to use that information; and it requires them to publish reports.

The Bill has a purpose. It is about institutions, it is about governance and it is about enabling. The amendment is designed to give it some teeth. It is designed to make a requirement in the Bill. This is a “must” amendment, not a “may” amendment. I beg to move.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Flight and Lord Tunnicliffe

Wednesday 25th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe]

My Lords, I hope to set a precedent whereby the commitment of our Benches is not necessarily proportionate to the length of the speech. I support the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer. Social enterprises are businesses that trade to tackle social problems and improve communities, people’s life chances or the environment. They make their money from selling goods and services on the open market and reinvest their profits back into the business of the local community. When they profit, society profits. We believe that Amendment 118AZA would contribute to their formation and therefore we support it.

On our Amendment 128AA, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, we believe that given the consensus in at least part of this Chamber that social investment is a good thing, it would be appropriate for the FCA to have a social investment panel that would sit alongside the small business and market practitioners and consumer panels. The FCA would have a duty to consult. The panel would represent the interests of organisations that specialise wholly or mainly in social finance or investment. Today’s debate has shown that if we can persuade government to go into this area it will be complex and will need an appropriate panel to help to develop the regulations around it.

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, I support the common sense of these amendments. However, charities are regulated by the Charity Commission. Although one hopes that all these social endeavours are extremely honest and properly run, it is important to be clear about what charges are involved, and that the people organising them are fit and proper people. There is a very real issue to address here. It would be fine to say, “Here is a green light. Be an investor like a sophisticated investor”, but behind this territory lie quite big issues concerning good conduct.