EU: UK Net Contributions

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

What I can confirm is that the UK’s priorities for expenditure include the following: substantial cuts to the common agricultural policy. However, I agree with the noble Lord that priorities for the UK include growth and competitiveness, climate change and external action. I am not going to speculate on how the negotiations will play out.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Will my noble friend confirm that, in the absence of any compromise, what is being asked for by the European Commission is a 6.8% increase in the budget? Is this not an extraordinarily high figure which shows an unbelievable insensitivity to the problems that Governments are facing across the EU as they try to rein back their deficits?

[Lord Sassoon]

Yes, I completely agree with my noble friend.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 11th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be committed to a Grand Committee.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, this Bill is of major importance—this is not my idea; it comes from the Minister—and is very significant indeed. However, for some reason the Minister wants to shuffle it off into the Grand Committee Room. The Bill needs close scrutiny and will bring forth the exquisite qualities of your Lordships’ House. There is a massive amount of expertise here that can make positive comment on the Bill and make it better than it is today. It would be quite wrong if we were to vote for the Bill to go into the Grand Committee Room. It should be debated in Committee on the Floor of the House and I hope that the committal Motion will be negatived by the House.

EU: Euro Area Crisis

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

What does my noble friend think about the article in the Times yesterday in which the German Foreign Minister said that within the European budget there were resources that could be used to stimulate the eurozone economy, including about €80 billion which remains unspent as we speak?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, within what needs to be tight discipline—tighter than has been exhibited in recent years—over the overall European budget, certainly these ideas of targeting funds better within the existing budget envelope need to be looked at very hard.

Independent Commission on Banking

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 19th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, the ICB estimates that the increased cost of borrowing could be of the order of 0.09 per cent to 0.16 per cent as a result of implementing these proposals. That is a very modest additional cost which is well within the smallest ever incremental change to the bank rate introduced by the Bank of England. I will not speculate about what might happen to bank customers where they are sold from one bank to another, but I believe that it is completely right that we should make it easier in all circumstances for bank customers to be able to switch their accounts. That is what the banking system is going to deliver.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Lawson, I shall sleep at night only when retail banks and investment banks have separate shareholders. Will the noble Lord answer my noble friend’s point about the ingenuity of those who run banks to find a way round the ring-fencing, thereby enabling retail banks to continue to back investment banks?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, as I have said, the way that the governance will work is that the ring-fenced subsidiary will have to have independent directors in the way that, for example, regulated utilities have to have directors who are independent of the holding company’s board. That is the principal protection in these circumstances.

EU: Credit Rating Agencies

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 3rd October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I have already said that the credit rating agencies got it completely wrong when it came to the rating of structured products. As a result of that, there have already been two regulations, so-called CRA1 and CRA2, out of Europe since the crisis and a third set of proposals is expected in November this year. The first two sets of proposals address the matters which the noble Lord raises. There is now a system of registration. There are new regulations around conflicts and how to handle them, as well as around transparency and disclosure. I agree that the issues he raises are serious, but they are very much the ones which the European regulations have addressed.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, does my noble friend accept that there are great shortcomings among the credit agencies when it comes to derivatives and so forth, but that that does not extend to their rating of sovereign debt? Does he further accept that when Standard and Poor’s downgraded American debt, that debt then became cheaper and bonds went up?

[Lord Sassoon]

I agree with my noble friend. I know that he was a member of your Lordships’ sub-committee which produced an excellent report published in July. Among its conclusions is that:

“The criticism that credit rating agencies precipitated the euro area crisis is largely unjustified; their downgrades merely reflected the seriousness of the problems that some Member States are currently facing”.

Banking: Northern Rock

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

I have made clear on this and previous occasions that the Government regard mutualisation as a desirable model. It would be wrong to say that it is the best model, as the noble Lord has suggested, but, indeed, we want to see variety of provision of financial services in this country by organisations with different models, of which mutualisation should be one.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Will the noble Lord explain how we can have mutualisation and the taxpayer get his money back at the same time?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, the overarching aim of any sales process, as well as getting a clear exit, is to obtain best value for the taxpayer. There are of course tensions between that objective and certain methods of sale, and that is precisely what the experts conducting the sale will assess.

Greece: Default Contingency

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 20th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, would my noble friend like to comment on press reports that Standard Chartered Bank is ceasing to be involved in short-term interbank transfers with European banks? Does he believe that to be true? Is it happening with other British banks? If so, what are the implications?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am not going to comment on what is going on in the markets and with individual banks at all, and I am sure that my noble friend would not expect me to. However, I would make the point, which was also made in the Statement, that UK banks have been able, in very tough market conditions, to improve their funding position very considerably over the past year and more. The overall situation of the interbank market is far better—although we should not take any of these things for granted—than it has been at points during the financial crisis. It is therefore important, as my noble friend reminds us, that confidence within the banking system enables there to be liquidity. As I say, we are in a much better position in that respect than we were during the financial crisis itself.

Taxation: Healthcare Insurance

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I can only repeat that there is no intention to change the relationship between private healthcare provision and entitlement to NHS care.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Can my noble friend clear my mind on this? If someone privately insures, whether they get tax relief or not, surely they remove a burden off the National Health Service.

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, they may to some extent at the margin remove a burden off the National Health Service, but, equally, under the previous arrangements where partial tax relief was given, there was considerable additional cost to the taxpayer. It is estimated that putting in place some new allowance would immediately cost the Exchequer at least £700 million—probably considerably more—because of the dead-weight effect of offering that relief to people who already have medical insurance.

Deficit Reduction

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, they will and do appear in tables in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts and records of sales. For example, the sales of fixed assets are dealt with in table 2.2, and the sales of financial assets when they come in are—

The noble Lord, Lord Peston, shakes his head, but I am looking at page 21 of the OBR’s Budget 2010 supplementary material which has tables. There are not yet financial sale numbers to go in for future years, but table 2.2 is there on page 21.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, will the Minister ensure that he gets his timing right on selling the shares in the banks, and not make the same mistake as Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, who sold most of our gold stock for $280 an ounce when the price is now $1,300 an ounce?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I do not want to give any hostages to fortune, but it would be difficult for any Chancellor to get it as disastrously wrong as that Chancellor did on the gold sales.

Autumn Forecast

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, it is always good to have the noble Lord, Lord Myners, present. I do not suppose that his Government ever applied any spin to any numbers. He shakes his head. Oh, well. All our memories are failing. Seriously, the difference this time is that we have a much greater, more transparent analysis of the numbers—over 150 pages of numbers. I am grateful to him for welcoming the formation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and I hope he will be with me, giving it a fair wind in Committee on the Bill shortly.

There is a serious point here. Not only are there 150 pages of analysis and a lot more detail than was ever given before, and not only has that been available a couple of hours before my right honourable friend’s Statement, but we will be able to pick over it in the next few weeks. The OBR itself will come to the Treasury Select Committee and answer questions there and all sorts of other questions in different fora.

As to his specific question on the output gap, yes the numbers show that it will be 0.9 per cent in 2015, down from 3.3 or 3.4 per cent as it is now and from 4.2 per cent as it got to in 2009. As to the levels of private sector debt, I do not accept the numbers given by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell; I accept the numbers that are in the OBR’s document. There will be a total leverage in the economy that is very far down on the over-leverage with which the previous Government left us.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Does my noble friend the Minister accept that one of the critical things that it was important for the coalition Government to do was to reassure the financial markets that we had a handle on the whole question of the deficit which we had inherited? That is one of the reasons—my noble friend mentioned this—why interest rates have come down since the coalition Government took over and since the new Budget was announced, and one of the reasons why the interest burden is going to be much less over the coming years.

However, is it not rather depressing that the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, still goes on about the possibility of a double-dip recession when it is quite clear from these forecasts that the chances of that are almost nil?

[Lord Sassoon]

I am very grateful to my noble friend. I absolutely share his view both on the depressing scenarios that the Opposition choose to paint and on the overall scenario for solid growth which the OBR confirms.

As to the judgment of the financial markets, I have looked at this morning’s numbers, and the UK spread over the German 10-year Bund has gone down from 96 basis points at the date of the general election to 60 basis points today, which is a very significant measure of confidence by the international markets in our consolidation plan.

Finance: Fiscal and Monetary Policy

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Does my noble friend accept that, if we are to see a revival in the economy, it is going to come from the private sector and from low interest rates, and that those interest rates would be very much higher if this Government were not addressing the appalling structural deficit that we inherited from the previous Government?

[Lord Sassoon]

I completely agree and am grateful to my noble friend for drawing our attention to that. Indeed, only 10 days ago, after the spending review, Standard and Poor’s, one of the leading rating agencies, moved our rating from negative to stable. It is that confidence that keeps interest rates low and enables businesses to invest.

Banking: Bonuses

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, lots of people threaten to do all sorts of things when they are in the middle of a negotiation. Whatever we continue to do to tackle unacceptable bonus structures in banks, we want to ensure that, among other things, they are incentivised to align their remuneration structures with the reduction of risks that bankers entail, and that we continue to have an important banking sector in this country.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, does my noble friend accept that one reason why there is so little finance for people to buy houses, and for small businesses, is that during the financial crisis many of the foreign banks took their money back to where they came from? They are not returning to London because they regard it as highly taxed, they regard certain members of the Government as extremely hostile to bankers, and they are worried about the degree of regulation. We must get these people back—contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said—because otherwise we will not have enough finance in this country to get the economy moving again.

[Lord Sassoon]

I certainly agree with my noble friend that we need a vibrant banking market to underpin the economy’s recovery. The action that the Government have taken to make sure that interest rates remain low is absolutely critical. We welcome the first steps taken recently by the British Bankers’ Association task force, which made a range of proposals that go to the heart of tackling the need for a continued flow of credit to British business.

Financial Services Regulation

Debate between Lord Sassoon and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Desai, for pressing on this point of legislation. I remind your Lordships that there was, indeed, provision in the Queen’s Speech for legislation. With the changes we are proposing it is safe to assume that primary legislation will be required. It will come forward in this Session. We should talk more about that, however, in relation to the further detailed arrangements.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, will the Minister share with the House his views on “too big to fail”? Does he not agree that within the capitalist system it is quite reasonable for investment banks to make enormous sums of money when things are good, but quite wrong for the taxpayer to bail them out when things go wrong? Has he any thoughts about how investment banks should be broken up into units small enough to be allowed to fail?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that. This goes to the heart of the questions which the banking commission will, I hope, answer for us.