Royal Bank of Scotland

Antoinette Sandbach Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words.

As the Chancellor made clear in his Mansion House speech last night, he was responsible for the decision point yesterday and for articulating a future path away from the situation he inherited. The right hon. Gentleman will remember that the Treasury predictions at the time of the interventions were that they would cost the taxpayer between £20 billion and £50 billion overall. The situation has moved on and the economy has recovered substantially from the largest recession in our peacetime history. It is time to put the banking sector into a new settlement, and to have a new settlement for our financial services.

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

Sir Mervyn King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, said:

“Why…did the Bank of England not do more to prevent the disaster? We should have. But the power to regulate banks had been taken away from us in 1997. Our power was limited to…preaching sermons.”

Will my hon. Friend confirm that the Bank of England now has the power to do more than just preach sermons?

[Harriett Baldwin]

I welcome my hon. Friend to the House and congratulate her on an excellent question. The tripartite arrangements for bank regulation put in place by the former Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath let the country down. The work of the last Parliament was to reframe our financial services regulation, so that the Bank of England could take responsibility, and so that we have a single point of regulation for the financial sector overall, supplemented by the important work of the Financial Conduct Authority on behaviour, and by the Prudential Regulation Authority. It is incredibly important that we have moved on from the tripartite arrangement. We do not want another situation in which the British taxpayer has to bail out a bank.