Budget Responsibility Bill

Lord Macpherson of Earl's Court Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court (CB)]

My Lords, this is a sensible Bill to strengthen a sensible institution. The creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, together with the granting of operational independence to the Bank of England, has transformed macroeconomic policy-making in the UK, and it is no coincidence that the premium the UK has had to pay on its debt, relative to its G7 partners, has declined over the last 25 years.

Economic forecasting is a thankless task. Forecasts are invariably wrong. The late Denis Healey’s commented that he would like to do for economic forecasters what the Boston Strangler did for the reputation of door-to-door salesmen. In an ideal world, forecasts would not be necessary. However, Governments have to plan public spending and the taxes necessary to pay for it. They need to do so over the medium term to better understand the implications for borrowing and the debt market. Somebody has to make the projections on which the decisions that determine the well-being of the nation are based.

Over my career at the Treasury, I worked on well over 60 fiscal events. For over 50, the Chancellor determined the forecast. It is fair to say that, on the vast majority of those occasions, the Chancellor did not seek to interfere with the forecast that Treasury officials presented to him. Even then, he often had to resist pressure from the First Lord of the Treasury to raise the growth rate just a little to make tax cuts or public spending increases more “affordable”—I emphasise the inverted commas surrounding the word affordable.

Whether or not Prime Ministers or Chancellors interfered, the perception of the markets was that they did. The result was that the forecast’s credibility was always called into question and that the taxpayer had to fund an interest rate on government debt that was slightly higher than it needed to be. Two years ago, that term came to be known as the “moron premium”. I emphasise that the OBR is no better at forecasting than other institutions; the importance is that its forecasts are perceived to be unbiased, and this is borne out by the evidence.

On the detail of the Bill, I welcome the Government putting a number on what constitutes fiscally significant. It may be a little on the high side—most fiscal events over the last 30 years have made a fiscal adjustment of less than 1% of GDP—but I see the problem in setting it too low and triggering an endless round of forecasts.

I also welcome the Government’s determination to improve the credibility of public spending projections. We should be in no doubt that an incredible spending forecast is the source of the problem with which the Government are now wrestling. Had the previous Government been required to populate their spending plans with policy decisions, I rather doubt that they would have announced successive cuts in national insurance contributions.

The measures set out in the Chancellor’s letter to Richard Hughes of 29 July are a big step forward: in particular, a clear timetable for spending reviews and a requirement for the Treasury regularly to update the OBR on emerging spending pressures. Allowing the OBR to publish, in effect, corrected spending plans will improve decision-making, even if it makes life more difficult for the Chancellor in the run-up to an election.

As the Government consider further reforms to the OBR framework, I encourage the Treasury to focus on another issue that also muddies the waters in the run-up to an election: the costing of opposition policies. Every four or five years, we have to go through the absurd theatre of the Chancellor of the day publishing, to great fanfare, official costings of their opponents’ policies. Of course, they are not official costings, since the assumptions are determined by Ministers and their special advisers. The Opposition are always rightly indignant at the time, claiming that the process is terribly unfair. I had to field unhappy telephone calls from shadow Chancellors from both main parties. But, once in government, parties have an uncanny knack of forgetting about the unfairness.

While the present Government are still in their early days of missionary zeal, I encourage them to resuscitate the 2015 proposal of the then shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, to put opposition costings in the hands of the OBR, as happens in countries such as Holland. I ask the Financial Secretary to raise this issue with the Chancellor when he returns to the Treasury.

Bank Resolution (Recapitalisation) Bill [HL]

Lord Macpherson of Earl's Court Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of C Hoare & Co, which would almost certainly be classified as a small bank for the purposes of the Bill.

I congratulate the Minister on becoming Financial Secretary to the Treasury. After the chancellorship of the Exchequer this is the oldest Treasury ministerial post, and I am pretty sure that it is the first time that it has been held by a Member of this House. I had the good fortune of working with the Minister for a decade around the turn of the century. He has huge Treasury experience and considerable ability and was a pleasure to work with. I wish him well in what will inevitably be difficult times ahead when no doubt he will come to this House on many occasions to make Ministerial Statements.

I speak in support of the Bill, which is a model of good legislative practice with a well-handled consultation and cross-party support. It is welcome that the new Government have seamlessly picked up where the previous Government left off. Politics is all about difference, but at least 90% of governing is about continuity.

Having been the Permanent Secretary and accounting officer when the Treasury had to nationalise Northern Rock and resolve the Icelandic banks in 2008, I am acutely aware that having the necessary powers in place makes it a whole lot easier. Of course, the Government can generally rely on common-law powers in such circumstances or, in the case of Northern Rock, pass an emergency Bill in 24 hours. I pay tribute to the late Lord Darling for managing the financial crisis so effectively with the limited powers then at his disposal, but I would not recommend a make-do-and-mend approach; it diverts finite resources from the job in hand, which is managing the crisis itself. It is better to have the right legislative and institutional framework in place, and to learn from each time the framework is tested in order to improve its functioning.

In 2008, it fell to the Treasury directly to resolve failing banks. I recall asking the Bank of England whether it would take on the role, thinking that the clue was in the name—it is a bank—and that a bank might be better at taking the necessary steps rather than a government department, but the Bank of England declined my request. Lord Darling put that right in his 2009 Act, which ensured that the resolution authority resides in the Bank of England. In my view, that is the right approach; the Bank of England is better placed to retain the necessary expertise and experience, not least because it can pay its staff more generously.

However, the Treasury needs to remain alert to one important point, which the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, touched on indirectly: the conflict of interest created by the abolition of the Financial Services Authority in 2013. The Bank of England is now the regulator and the resolution authority, and responsible for macro- prudential policy. It also in effect has the power to tax the industry through PRA fees and the wider Bank of England levy. The Bill extends its powers of taxation by allowing it to draw on the Financial Services Compensation Scheme to recapitalise a failing bank. There is nothing wrong with that in principle; it is much better that the industry finances its failures rather than the general taxpayer.

The Bank of England generally does its job well. All I am asking is that Treasury Ministers maintain adequate oversight. To this end, they need to be vigilant to three issues. First, apart from the brief period in 2007 when fear of moral hazard dominated its thinking, the Bank of England has a historical tendency to intervene. I recall Sir Douglas Wass, one of my predecessors at the Treasury, some 40 years after the event still expressing irritation at the Treasury being kept in the dark about the Bank’s intervention in the secondary banking crisis of 1973-74. I can foresee circumstances where the Bank will choose to recapitalise a small bank rather than put it into a bank insolvency process, less because it is in the national interest and more as a way of minimising the reputational damage of regulatory failure.

Secondly, because of the Bank’s power to tax the banking industry, I fear that it will pay insufficient attention to minimising the costs of resolution. I may be wrong, but my recollection is that the Bank of England incurred greater costs, with advisers and so on, in resolving the Dunfermline Building Society than the Treasury did in resolving the Icelandic banks. Unlike the Government, the Bank does not have to stand for re-election, so its incentive to contain costs is rather less.

Finally, it is important that small banks remain well capitalised. Challenger banks are adept at lobbying government and central banks for special treatment, arguing that this enhances competition. To some degree it does, but they are not slow to make political donations. I witnessed this at first hand a decade or so ago. It is important that the authorities ignore these blandishments. As my old friend the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, used to observe, the best way to ensure that the banking system is safe is to ensure that it is adequately capitalised.

I should emphasise that these are minor points that are more about the spirit of Treasury oversight than the substance, and I am happy to support the Bill.