Barry Gardiner
Main Page: Barry Gardiner (Labour - Brent West)Department Debates - View all Barry Gardiner's debates with the HM Treasury
Independent Banking Commission Report
Barry Gardiner Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Osborne
Of course, that is the difficult balance that we all must get right. The challenge is to ensure that banks can lend well, as people have been asking them to, while at the same time ensuring that they have a greater cushion should things go wrong. In his report, one of the things that John Vickers points to is that if a bank is ring-fenced, its retail deposits are more likely to be used to support retail lending than to support an investment bank’s activities. He thinks that the ring fence could positively enhance lending opportunities for ring-fenced banks.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Given that Northern Rock had no investment arm and Lehmans had no retail arm, does the Chancellor have any sympathy with the view that ring-fencing will add little over the proper capital requirements and ethical investment decisions that Vickers calls for, save for £6 billion additional cost to the UK economy?
Mr Osborne
The short answer is no, I do not. On pages 31, 32 and 33, the report of John Vickers and his commission goes through how the reforms would have improved the situation regarding Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, RBS and HBOS. We must remember that the reforms are in the round. I have been asked a lot about ring-fencing and retail lending, but there are also higher capital requirements, and a requirement for a loss-absorbing cushion for bondholders. Those changes would also have helped with Northern Rock. On top of that, the new regulatory regime would, I hope, have exercised more judgment.
Of course, the ring-fencing idea, which is just one of the four or five major recommendations, is only really relevant to universal banks. The only universal bank listed by the hon. Gentleman that went wrong is RBS. As is clear from the memoirs of the former Chancellor, ring-fencing would have helped enormously to resolve the problems of a very complex universal bank without the need for recourse to the taxpayer.