Queen’s Speech

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I join noble Lords in welcoming to this House and congratulating my noble friend Lord O’Neill of Gatley and the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, on their excellent and interesting maiden speeches.

My noble friend Lord Horam said that the BRICs were made famous by my noble friend Lord O’Neill, although surely it was the other way around and my noble friend became famous for coining the acronym BRICs. The noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, asked him to invent a new acronym for productivity. I am not sure that is a good idea, because there are already too many acronyms, and in fact they are divisive. Acronyms are used more and more in public life and put off the majority of the population, who do not understand what they mean and feel that they appear to be ignorant if they ask. Rather than inventing new acronyms, I hope my noble friend the Minister will concentrate on the commitments that he made to enhancing productivity and to removing a lot of the strangling regulation that we have today.

While it is good for business and the economy that we have the first Conservative Government in 19 years, it is disconcerting for us on these Benches that there are so many fewer noble Lords that we may call our noble friends.

I welcome the introduction of the enterprise Bill, which is intended to cut red tape. This Bill should help to accelerate the encouraging increase in registrations of new companies, from some 480,000 in 2012 to more than 580,000 in 2014, a 20% increase in two years. It is also welcome that the Government have pledged to discourage EU bodies from imposing burdensome rules and have promised that any new regulations that come through from Brussels will be implemented as benignly as possible in the UK.

In order to succeed in a global market, businesses have a strong incentive to meet the standards required in their principal export markets. That in itself will encourage the harmonisation of standards applied across developed-world markets. Beyond that, I hope that the Government will insist in their negotiations with the EU that the principle of subsidiarity be given a great deal more weight than it appears to have been given in recent years.

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Business has said that the enterprise Bill will contain deregulatory measures to cut £10 billion of red tape. I ask the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, how this figure is calculated. BIS has also announced that the Government’s ambitious target for cutting red tape will look beyond Whitehall and extend to independent regulators for the first time. I wonder whether that includes the European regulators.

I would like to mention the City, including the wider financial services industry, which also has a significant presence in Edinburgh and some other northern cities. I believe that it is time to stop punishing the City. It is arguably the jewel in our crown; it is certainly one of the most sparkling of them. It has come to be by far the most significant and successful financial centre in the European time zone and arguably in the world, not as a result of our membership of the EU, any other group or a politically created market but simply because of the City’s history, stability and highly respected and effective legal and accountancy regimes, the talents of its practitioners and the infrastructure and everything else that our great City of London has to offer.

The City has reacted well to the financial crisis and continues to learn from its mistakes. Several banks have had to pay extremely large fines as a result of LIBOR and foreign exchange-rate fixing. I consider that the balance of punishment has been tilted too much towards the banks and too little towards individuals who may have broken the law. If they have, it is they who should be punished, not the shareholders of the banks. Does the Minister agree?

Given the importance of the City to this nation’s prosperity and productivity, it is important continually to assess what kind of regulation will best protect the consumer against exploitation and at the same time enable our financial services companies to thrive in what is a global rather than a European market. In particular, given that banks now have to comply with greatly increased capital requirements, effective resolution regimes and strengthened deposit insurance arrangements, I would question whether the ring-fencing of retail banking will be necessary or appropriate. The time has come for us to look forward and consider how best we can maximise growth in the economy, in jobs and in tax revenues.

Ring-fenced retail banking would not have saved Northern Rock, and neither would RBS have been protected from the difficulties it encountered if ring-fencing were in force. Neither bank got into trouble because of its investment-banking activities, but the implementation of ring-fencing will be a significant burden for Barclays, HSBC and RBS, and if any one of these banks is considering whether to maintain its global headquarters in the UK, ring-fencing is certainly one of the factors supporting relocation. Other major countries have not introduced ring-fencing and have no intention of so doing.

I would also argue that the City should not be burdened with cumbersome and unnecessary regulation introduced by the European regulators EBA, ESMA and EIOPA, together with the ESRB. On its own, the UK would never have chosen to introduce much of the growing body of EU financial services and insurance regulation to which it is now subject.

As my noble friend the Minister has mentioned, the Government are committed to improving productivity and increasing living standards. That will not be achieved by an artificial rebalancing of the economy in favour of manufacturing. However, the more our financial services sector can thrive and prosper, the better will be the background and conditions necessary for a continued manufacturing revival. There is no statistical evidence that EU regulation has liberalised trade in financial services between the UK and the rest of the EU. Most of the UK’s financial services and insurance exports to the rest of the EU are wholesale in nature and not dependent on the UK’s EU membership. There are no obvious grounds for arguing that EU regulation enables the UK to manage the financial services and insurance sector better than it could do on its own. The European supervisory authorities should be the regulators for the eurozone, and the UK’s PRA and FCA should be restored to their deserved status as global-level regulators equivalent to the SEC of the United States and Japan’s FSA. I ask my noble friend to confirm that powers to regulate the City will be among those which the Government will ensure are returned to our own national regulators.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and other noble Lords, I do not understand the reason for the Government legislating to stop themselves from legislating to increase taxes. We can trust the Government to honour their commitment not to increase taxes, but they do not need to tie their own hands and restrict their ability to react prudently and promptly to any unforeseen economic disaster. I look forward to the remaining contributions, and especially to my noble friend the Minister’s winding-up speech.