Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Peston and Baroness D'Souza

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Baroness D'Souza)]

In calling Amendment 190AA, I must advise noble Lords that if this amendment is agreed to I shall not be able to call Amendment 190B by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, I hope that I have heard the gist of what the noble Baroness was trying to say. She ended by asking the fundamental question, which is not only what Clause 64 is here for but what this whole section of the Bill is here for. That is not very clear. If these powers had been enshrined in statute, are we to believe that the catastrophes of the recent past would not have occurred? Is that the purpose? I cannot believe that you do investigations to prevent a catastrophe occurring; what you do is intervene and stop it. This section must therefore be there simply to say, “Look, we made a mess of things, including ourselves as policymakers and regulators, so we’re setting up this inquiry to discover what we can learn from the mess that we’ve got ourselves involved with”. I take it that that is probably the answer to the noble Baroness’s question but, like her, I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.