Baroness Kramer
Main Page: Baroness Kramer (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement. He could have spared us the reference to the long-term economic plan, which seems to vary and inflate almost from day to day in terms of the length of time that it occupies and the objectives that are set for it.
I am pleased that the Statement recognises that the taxpayers who bailed out RBS during the global financial crisis want value for their money and are somewhat suspicious of any rush to sell. That is why they will be suspicious of the Government’s actions at this time. RBS is still restructuring its business and it is very difficult to see the outcome. It is still awaiting a US settlement for the mis-selling of subprime mortgages. In case noble Lords have forgotten, the global crisis started with subprime mortgages in the United States. Banks started to collapse long before a Labour Government were ever considered to have overspent as the basis for the global crisis. I hope that we will have no references to that in this short debate on the Statement.
The Chancellor said two years ago that he would countenance the sale of RBS only when,
“the bank is fully able to support our economy and when we get good value”.
Does the Minister really think that these tests have been met? While we have always supported the eventual return of RBS to the private sector, it is surely essential that the Treasury gets back as much money as possible to help pay down the national debt, and therefore to limit the impact on the wider population of the costs involved. RBS of course had to be bailed out with great urgency but it does not have to be sold off at the same speed. It is not the case that the Governor of the Bank of England is telling Ministers that the price is right now. He makes it very clear in his letter that questions of valuation are entirely for the Government; it is their judgment which is, rightly, at stake.
On the specifics, can the Minister clarify exactly what the Government accept as a break-even share price for the bank? A potential £7.2 billion loss might be understating things because the Rothschild calculation, which is the basis for that figure, has netted off the fees that the Government have received from the bank since 2008.
When it comes to Lloyds, the Treasury has already pledged that shares sold through the Government’s trading plan will not be sold for less than 73.6p—the price the Government paid for them. That is the red line for Lloyds. What is the equivalent red line for this premature sell-off? Why cannot the Minister give us more detail about precisely when the sale will commence? What impact does he predict that that will have overall on the debt reduction?
It is important that we do not allow the Government to state that RBS losses can be put against the gains that will potentially be made in other areas such as Lloyds. RBS was purchased by the public in dire circumstances and taxpayers have every right to insist that the Government get their money back. But we are not too confident that the Government can do this; we saw their recent effort regarding the first part of the sale of Royal Mail, and look what a mess they made of that, with a loss for the public purse.
Finally, it may be noted that the Chancellor made his statement to the banking community last night, and the Minister repeated constantly in his contribution what the Chancellor said to the bankers. They are an important section of the community, but I do not think it does this Government any credit when Parliament is treated in such a mean fashion: when a junior Minister—a junior Minister—speaks in the other place and a Whip speaks in this place. Much as I have regard for the talents of the noble Lord who is addressing us, he will recognise that this Statement deserved a Treasury Minister speaking here, and that the Chancellor ought to have spoken in the other place earlier today.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, I have been away from the markets too long over the last two years, at the Department for Transport, to know whether this is the right time to be selling off either RBS or Royal Mail. However, first, although I only skimmed it, I did not find that Rothschild’s report to be terribly enlightening. Secondly, if this is a fire sale to fill holes in the budget because the Government are foundering on trying to find that impossible £12 billion in welfare cuts, and have handcuffed themselves in terms of raising taxes through their commitment to a law to prevent them from doing so, that is absolutely the wrong answer. This should not be used to fill other holes in the bucket unless we are getting the best possible value for these two assets.
I want to make a final try to persuade the Government to take a much more constructive approach to returning RBS to private hands. The Government should be breaking this bank up, into either regional or community banks, to begin to remedy a critical missing layer in our banking system. The Government carried out a half-hearted review—I know how much they resisted even doing that review—of alternatives to simply passing this back as is, as it were, to the public. They used an investment bank to do the review, which was exactly the wrong choice—an institution which cannot understand the dynamic. This should go out to the public: there should be a discussion with small businesses and a general consultation to try to decide how we can best return RBS to the private sector.
Small and medium-sized companies find it difficult still to access credit, and that credit is vital to economic growth and absolutely vital for productivity, which the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, has often talked about. On Monday, we had the debate on trade and investment, and noble Lords brought out the difficulties for small and medium-sized companies in raising export finance. Leading economies that successfully grow their small businesses, such as Germany, the United States and Switzerland, have some form of regional and community banking. We are missing this layer, and here would be a great opportunity. Of course we have new players—challenger banks and peer-to-peer lending—but RBS, broken up, would really shift the landscape. Surely keeping RBS as it is continues the too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-manage problems that we all bemoan. Although it is guilty of plenty of scandals, RBS largely failed the old-fashioned way by making appalling loans.
The taxpayer is not going to make money on this sale, so why not use it to achieve something much more important than immediately money—a shift in the banking landscape that would underpin growing prosperity? Once this opportunity is lost, it will never return.
I will make one last comment, on the fair and effective markets review. I need time to go through that in detail, but the RBS losses are a reminder of the depth and the consequences of the banking crisis. We all always knew that when the crisis itself passed, the banks would begin their special pleading, sweetened with a little blackmail, to reverse both the penalties and levies that they faced and the regulation that has now been introduced. I ask the Government not to go wobbly on us. We need the Government to stand tall and carry through on the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and others to give us a secure banking system.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness for their remarks. First, the noble Lord opposite commented on the mention in the Statement of the economic plan. The long-term economic plan is the reason we are able to make this sell-off at the moment and why we think that it is for the benefit of the nation to do this now. We make no apologies for mentioning the long-term economic plan, which has been so successful.
The noble Lord referred to a rush to sell. There is no rush to sell and there is no question of a fire sale. The Government—the nation and the taxpayer—own 79% of RBS, and there is no question of selling the whole lot as a fire sale. At the moment, we are going to sell bits of it in tranches, first to institutions: that is the way that is most suitable and the way recommended both by the Governor of the Bank of England and by independent advice. We have met the tests that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned. We will obviously get as much as we can for the sale and certainly intend to get value for the taxpayer. If all goes well, based on prices at 5 June, there will be £14 billion more than we paid to rescue the banks. It is not unreasonable to put those together, because this is part of the overall government strategy of returning these banks to private hands so that they can operate in a more effective way.
I completely agree with the noble Lord opposite that it is the Government’s judgment in the end to decide on the price. It is the Chancellor’s responsibility to get the best price for the Government, and he is perfectly prepared to take on that responsibility. In fact, he mentioned in his speech that it would be much easier for him to wait until the share price went up and not do the initial tranche at a loss. However, he is not going to do that, but is going to make the right decision for the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked why we do not have a red line, as with Lloyds. We are going to allow the sale to happen in tranches, as I said, and the price will depend on what happens as those individual tranches go through. It is a bit rich for a party that sold gold at an all-time record low in government to complain about Royal Mail and getting the price wrong.
It is true that the Chancellor made his annual Mansion House speech to bankers. That is a perfectly normal place to talk about economic policy. I have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s last point, when he asked why the Chancellor did not make the Statement himself and why the Treasury Minister here did not repeat it. I have to be honest and say that I asked that question too, but of course the reason is that my noble friend the Minister is doing important government work elsewhere for the benefit of the nation.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, was honest enough to admit that she has been away from the markets too long to quote the correct price, unlike the noble Lord opposite. She referred to a fire sale. We are not, as I said, selling this all at once. The pricing of these things is very difficult, and it is important to know that the loss that people are talking about is only if we sold all of our 79% share at the existing price that pertained on 5 June. The loss or profit may go up and may go down. That of course applies to the overall £14 billion profit that I quoted, which is dependent on the price that pertained on 5 June.
The noble Baroness referred to a lost opportunity to reorganise RBS before we sell it off. That is a slightly different theoretical question. It is an important one, but it is beyond today’s remit and the question of price. However, it is important to know that our strategy in selling banks and putting them back into the private sector is because we want them to do their job properly of supporting SMEs and British business. They will do that better in private hands. That is what our independent advice told us. The governor was very clear about that.