EUC Report: MiFID II

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Liddle

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, before I begin I should say that the think tank that I chair, Policy Network, has received funding from the City of London Corporation.

I will make three points in introducing what I have to say. First, I agree with the final point of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and with his tribute to my noble friend Lord Harrison and his fellow committee members—that should go on the record—for the excellent work that they do in bringing informed debate to the House.

Secondly, I will avoid the considerable temptation offered by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, to engage in the debate about the euro that he has so richly offered. I will just say—this is not meant to be a cruel point—that he has been making the same speech ever since I was privileged to join the House in 2010, and the euro has not collapsed yet. Even in what I agree was the mismanaged Cyprus crisis, the Cypriot Government decided that they would prefer to take the pain and stay in the euro rather than leave it.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Does the noble Lord accept that the pain has not even started in Cyprus yet?

[Lord Liddle]

They knew perfectly well what they were doing by signing up to the deal that they did. Perhaps I may make another aside. The idea that taxpayers should always pick up the bill for the irresponsibility of bankers is offensive. A lot of people in Cyprus have enjoyed the benefits of relatively high interest rates, which pensioners in Britain have not enjoyed over the past few years. The idea that they made these investments in a noble way that should be protected by the European taxpayer is, I think, offensive.

Thirdly, I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, that the issues raised in this report are very complicated. I am certainly not in a position to talk about the details. Instead, I want to focus on the Government’s political strategy for handling these financial services questions. This is not a party point; it seems to me that as a nation we have a real difficulty here. A number of propositions form the approach on this side of the Room. The first is that we need a healthy financial services sector; I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, and the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, on this. Yes, we need to rebalance our economy. My noble friend Lord Mandelson was right to say that we have had too much financial engineering and not enough real engineering, but the financial services sector is a huge overseas earner for us and we cannot do without it. It is a vital national interest where we have a comparative advantage. However, we have to acknowledge that things have gone wrong in the City in the recent past. Grave reputational damage has been done as the result of the LIBOR scandal and the scandals around mis-selling. Risks were taken that should never have been, and as a result we need to rethink the way we regulate the City.

The second proposition that should inform government policy on a national strategy in this area is that the City benefits hugely from being the financial centre of the European single market. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is right to say that what Britain achieved in the 1990s and the early 2000s—I was slightly involved in the 1999 Financial Services Action Plan—was tremendous. It opened up the market and ensured that London got a larger share of it. What happened, though, was that we had liberalisation without putting in place proper cross-country regulation, and we have to acknowledge that that was a UK mistake. It was a UK consensus that we should have light-touch regulation and we got it wrong. The Turner report that was published at the start of the financial crisis said that we have to choose between European regulation and being part of the European market or going back to national regulation, and that is basically right. I think that both the then Labour Government and the new Conservative/Lib Dem coalition have accepted that we are part of a properly regulated European single market in financial services.

However, the result of all this is that on the Continent there is now a great suspicion of UK motives in this field. I sense this an awful lot as I travel around to various meetings. Therefore, the third objective we have to set ourselves is to accept that we need re-regulation at the European level, but that it has to be done in a proportionate and sensible way. I have some sympathy with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, about shutting the stable door and things moving on so that the new regulations will not cope with the new circumstances, but we must recognise that we have to put a national effort, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, into getting our regulatory strategy right.

We face big problems here. There are some basic asymmetries that put us in a difficult position. We had very strong support from what you might call the northern liberals for the positions that we took in the 1990s and 2000s but I am not sure to what extent that support is as solid as it once was, which I think is one of the reasons why the coalition on the financial transaction tax that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, wants has not occurred. There is an asymmetry of expertise. People complain about the bureaucracy of the Commission, but when you look at the thousands of people employed in the regulatory agencies in London and the dozens who are dealing with these matters in the Commission—a very small group of people covering a very wide brief—it is not surprising that sometimes the proposals that come forward are flawed in key respects. The Commission tries to listen and amend in the light of representations made to it.

Another major asymmetry, which is a very serious one, is that there are euro-ins and euro-outs. We are among the euro-outs, and that is the way it is going to be, but we have to recognise, as a euro-out, that financial regulation is fundamental to the financial stability of the eurozone. If they are going to do whatever it takes to stabilise the euro then they will be prepared in the eurozone to adopt whatever financial regulations they believe are necessary to stabilise their currency.

In this situation, the national strategy clearly has to be to go out of our way to win friends and influence people. That is where the Government—or perhaps only one part of the coalition—has got it so badly wrong. There is a difficult environment for us in the European Parliament. They think bankers are to blame for the crisis and that Britain is, in part, to blame because we pushed a deregulatory agenda. How do we deal with that? Not by going in with the Thatcher handbag, nor by doing what David Cameron did at the December 2011 European Council in circulating a paper—which, incidentally, has never been disclosed to Parliament, although we have seen it and know what is in it—that had “unanimity” written at the top and which, to anyone who looked at it, would look as though the British Government were basically seeking to reverse qualified majority voting on a large number of financial services questions. It was a disastrous strategy: how could you expect the eurozone to agree to surrender sovereignty over their currency to Britain through our having a veto over financial regulation? We have to argue from a position of qualified majority, and we have to win friends and base our position on reason and good argument.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that we have to point out to people the advantages of London being the global centre of the single market and all that that brings. At the same time, though, we have to acknowledge the criticisms of the City that have been made and demonstrate that we are prepared to see them tackled. That is basically the question that I put to the Minister: how are the Government going to do that? What is their political strategy for dealing with these questions, which are of vital national importance, even though they are of great complexity and difficulty for many members of the committee?