Oral Answers to Questions Debate

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Department: HM Treasury

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts
Tuesday 25th June 2013

(11 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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George Osborne Portrait Mr Osborne
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RBS: the world’s largest bail-out, under a Government who completely failed to regulate it. How dare the right hon. Gentleman have the audacity to come here and complain about the Royal Bank of Scotland? We are fixing the problems in the Royal Bank of Scotland. We are looking at the case for establishing a “bad bank”, which, as I said at the Mansion House, should have been done in 2008. We are going to fix the mess in the banking system that Labour left behind.

Andrea Leadsom Portrait Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
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I congratulate my right hon. Friend on setting up the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. Does he believe that implementing some of its recommendations will help banks to lend? Will he urge the Leader of the House to allocate time for a debate on this subject?

George Osborne Portrait Mr Osborne
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We will have plenty of time to debate the recommendations of the parliamentary commission, which I think has done an absolutely excellent job for the House, by the way. We will shortly have the Report stage of the Banking Bill, at which the Government will say how we intend to respond to those recommendations. If there is more work to be done on the drafting of specific amendments, those amendments can be tabled in the House of Lords and they will of course come back to the House of Commons as well. The whole purpose of the parliamentary commission was to enable us to get on with this. If we had created a public inquiry, as Labour recommended, it would only just be getting going now. Instead, Parliament has done what it is supposed to do, which is to investigate a problem and provide recommendations, and we are going to debate those recommendations here.