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Lord Haskel Excerpts

Tuesday 1st April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

The coalition Government are not the first to be badly advised by the City, and probably not the last. Will the Government therefore say that they got it wrong and apologise, in exactly the same way that they keep asking the previous Labour Government to apologise for their mistakes?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, we have absolutely no apology to make. I take this House back to the conditions in October 2013. With advice from the advisers, who were chosen through a proper process, the price was set according to the likely demand. As I mentioned earlier, at least 500 investors were consulted. It is fair to say that there is no evidence to suppose that if the price range of 260p to 330p had changed—330p being at the upper end of that range—it would have made any difference. Therefore, we feel that we got it right at the time, and do not have any apology to make.