Securitisation (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I will focus briefly on the second of the two statutory instruments. I need help from the Minister, because I am struggling to understand the consequences of this, and I am looking specifically at STS recognition. The Minister will understand that achieving classification as an STS is advantageous because it is very likely to lead to preferential capital treatment. That is very important to banking institutions, which obviously want to keep their capital requirements as low as possible. At the moment, to qualify for STS classification, all the parties to an STS securitisation have to be located within the EU. If I understand the change that flows from this statutory instrument, if we were to leave without a deal, the regime we would move into says that in the UK an STS can be recognised provided that just one of the relevant players is located in the EU—most likely the sponsor. I raise this issue because it sounds as though securitisations in the EU and in all third countries now become available for classification as an STS.

I raise that concern because we are all very aware that the United States has gone back to its old tricks in mortgage lending, and asset-backed paper, backed by US mortgages, is once more beginning to raise some fairly significant issues of concern. We have been protected from that to some degree by the STS regime, which requires that all relevant players are within the EU. If I understand this correctly, that protection is now removed, and since third countries can now get STS classification and therefore preferential capital treatment, we increase the risk or the attraction quite possibly—or rather, quite likely—to UK institutions to once again start playing in that environment of US mortgage-backed securities, where we already know there is incipient trouble; I hope it is genuinely incipient, but some people are using much stronger language than that. I would therefore like the Minister to explain that.

The other issue on which I had a question was under exposures to national promotional banks. At the moment, national promotional banks located in the EU, again, are eligible to be provided with preferential treatment. It would therefore encourage a financial institution to invest in those national promotional institutions because if it lends to them, it faces a lower capital requirement. What is the situation that will fall out of the picture, according to the Explanatory Memorandum? It seems to be KfW, which is the German state-owned development bank. A UK investor who is lending money to KfW would no longer get that preference as it calculated its required capital ratios.

To me, this is the equivalent of “have gun, shoot foot”. KfW is a major player in funding small businesses in the UK. It has sat alongside the European Investment Fund and the European Investment Bank in putting significant blocs of long-term patient capital into large-scale infrastructure in the UK. I know that we have the British Investment Bank, but it is minuscule compared to the EIB, the EIF and KfW, and nothing I have heard from government suggests a scale-up to anywhere like the same dimensions. Why, then, would we, in a situation like this, try to discourage KfW from looking at opportunities to put its money into projects in the UK, and especially into that much-needed arena of small business? I find it slightly perverse but that is one of the things that this SI apparently intends to achieve. As I said, I am very fond of the British Investment Bank but, boy, does it have a long way to go before it can possibly replace those other institutions. Surely we should be encouraging KFW—we cannot do anything about the EIF or the EIB because of European rules—to keep it as a player.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I studied these two SIs with great care and could not object to their general direction. I even managed to think of three penetrating questions, which the Minister unfortunately answered in his opening statement, so I shall not repeat them. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Sharkey and Lord Deben, for their contribution. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, was concerned about the FCA costs. To some extent, that does not worry me nearly as much is whether there are competent resources. I worry whether there are enough people who want to work in a regulatory atmosphere who have enough competence to take this mess called falling out of the EU, fit it all altogether and discharge all their responsibilities. I can only just bring myself to ask this as a question, because I know that the Minister has a standard answer.

Building on the comments made earlier, the facts of life are that this is a dreadful deal. There is nothing wrong with the instrument, but if you are going to get into a dreadful situation, there are dreadful consequences. Although the Minister may say, as I am sure he will, that the issue of reciprocity is not nearly as bad as we all make out because the other side will want to do reciprocal deals, my experience of negotiation is that it is not that straightforward. They hold the cards, and if reciprocal agreements are made, good, but I fear that they will be somewhat one-sided.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and I shall try to deal with the issues that have been raised. A common theme is the issue of reciprocity, first raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, and my noble friend Lord Deben. As a matter of EU law, it is for the EU to decide who gets access to data held in the EU and we cannot in the SIs tell the EU what to do. However, we hope that it will take steps to protect financial stability—the consequences would be serious if it did not—and the Government are working to avoid a no-deal exit.

In the meantime, we are taking steps to minimise the disruption for the UK, and there have been some helpful indications on the issue of reciprocity. We welcome the announcements that the EU and some individual member states have made to date, which indicate that they would take steps to mitigate some of the risks. The Commission has taken a positive step in legislating to give the UK temporary equivalence for CCPs in a no-deal scenario, and the ESMA announced last week that all three UK CCPs will be recognised, mitigating a key no-deal risk to stability. Certain other member states, such as Germany and Sweden, have also announced various contingency measures. We stand ready to intensify our engagement, engage in bilateral discussion wherever possible and co-operate with EU institutions on preparedness for all scenarios, because it is in our mutual interest to lessen the risk of disruption to households and businesses in both the UK and the EU.

My noble friend Lord Deben asked a question which I think he has asked before about the resources of the FCA. Each time a Minister has said that these are very small incremental obligations, he has asked: what happens if you add them all up? It is a good question. Under the EU securitisation regulation which has applied from January this year, the PRA and the FCA already carry out most of the functions conferred on them by this SI. The main responsibilities transferring to the FCA relate to the authorisation and supervision of a small number of trade repositories and the publication of STS notifications on its website. We do not honestly think that this will create a significant burden for the FCA, which has specialist expertise in place and has made extensive preparations, including training supervisors, in anticipation of the implementation of the EU securitisation regulation and the onshoring of its requirements.