Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Gordon of Strathblane and Lord Carrington of Fulham

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, I too will speak very briefly in favour of the amendment. It seems that there is no ideological objection to the proposal from the Government. What has happened is that it has lost priority. That loss of priority may be for perfectly innocent reasons but surely everyone recognises that it is capable of being misinterpreted adversely from the point of view of good relations in the United Kingdom. I simply urge the Government to restore it to the priority it had when it was first announced.

[Lord Carrington of Fulham (Con)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate but I have been encouraged to do so. First, I remind your Lordships of my interests as declared in the register: I am chairman of a sharia-compliant bank in London and therefore have some knowledge of the problems, but I have also spent my professional lifetime in sharia banking.

I encourage the Government to move ahead as rapidly as possible in providing these loans. Clearly, there are no real problems in doing so from a sharia point of view. All those problems are well understood and are easily addressed by conventional techniques in sharia banking. There are problems, however, in the way that the Bank of England treats those types of loans and in the way that the Treasury looks at them. I suggest that the Government really need to move ahead to resolve those issues as quickly as possible because the benefit to the Muslim community of providing these types of loans outweighs any difficulties I can see that the Government could face.