Bankers’ Bonuses

Debate between Beth Winter and Jon Trickett

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government policy on bankers’ bonuses.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mrs Cummins. It is good to hear somebody from the old West Riding, as we would call it, in charge of the sitting this afternoon. I look forward to fair but firm chairpersonship.

It was the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht who once said that, to make money from banking, set up a bank rather than rob one. People make more money that way. It is clear that there needs to be a wider debate about the role of the financial sector in the British economy, but it is good to start with the remuneration structures in the finance sector. That is what this debate is about.

The previous Chancellor’s deplorable mini-Budget, as I would insist it is called, contained a series of clearly mistaken policy shifts. Following the change in Chancellor and then in Prime Minister, almost the whole of that mini-Budget disappeared, except for one thing: the idea that we should lift or remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses. I hope that the Minister will be able to change Government policy this afternoon, following my persuasion, but we will see what he says.

We have been here before on the question of bankers’ bonuses. I want quickly to recall what happened in the 2008 banking crash. As it happened, I was working in Downing Street at the time and saw clearly that we were on an economic precipice, in part because bankers’ remuneration had been allowed to let rip. The crash almost brought down our whole economic system.

When it came time to review how the crash happened, a significant part of it was attributed to the reckless culture of greed in the banking sector, which had exposed the banks to unacceptable levels of risk. Adair Turner, the then chair of the Financial Services Authority, said that

“inappropriate incentive structures played a role in encouraging behaviour which contributed to the financial crisis”.

He is hardly a man of the left, and therefore I think his words might be regarded as authoritative.

In 2009, the all-party Treasury Committee returned to the question of remuneration. It said that remuneration in the banking industry had played a role in causing the banking crisis. It questioned whether Turner’s response was strong enough and whether

“the Financial Services Authority has attached sufficient priority to tackling remuneration in the City.”

As we know, although bankers played a major role in bringing the system to its knees, in the immediate aftermath of the crash no banker was charged with any offence, in spite of their reckless behaviour. Many people in the country, in my constituency and elsewhere—perhaps in yours, Mrs Cummins—thought that at least some of them should have served time at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

It was the European Union that eventually instituted control of bankers’ bonuses. The EU said that no banker should receive a bonus of more than 100% of their salary—though where that figure came from I do not know—or 200% if shareholders had voted in agreement. It is that cap that the Government appear to now be intent on removing.

I want to use this short debate to ask three questions. First, how much is remuneration for bankers now, 14 years after the crash? Secondly, who is suggesting that the bankers’ cap be removed and why? Thirdly, how do we justify an ethos of greed as a determining factor guiding so many decision makers in a strategically important sector of the British economy?

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very important speech, particularly in terms of who is advocating this policy. When the previous Chancellor made the fiscal statement announcing the policy, I tabled a written question asking how many people in my constituency of Cynon Valley were going to benefit from lifting the bankers’ bonus. The response was as expected and inadequate, in that the Government said that they did not know. I wonder whether that was because nobody in Cynon Valley is going to benefit from it. Does my hon. Friend agree that the reason nobody in places such as Cynon Valley will benefit is that the ban is being lifted to benefit financiers and others in the City, when the people who should be benefitting are those in the regions of Wales, the north of England and Scotland and our essential key workers—nurses, teachers and so on?

[Jon Trickett]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree with every point she made and I will develop some of those arguments as I speak.

First, I will address the question of where we are now with remuneration in the banking sector. We know quite a lot about it. The chief executive officer and chief financial officer of Britain’s largest bank, HSBC, were paid $2.2 million and $1.3 million, respectively, for 2021. The truth is that bankers’ bonuses have doubled in spite of the cap since the 2008 financial crash. According to the most recently available data, there are 3,500 bankers working in our country who made more than €1 million—£880,000—in a single year. That information comes from the European Banking Authority. Seven out of 10 of all the bankers who made more than €1 million in the whole of Europe are located in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, 27 bankers in the UK were paid more than €10 million in a year. Two UK-based asset managers received between €38 million and €39 million in a year—I think that clearly makes the point referred to by my hon. Friend—and at the top of the pops, one merchant banker was paid €64.8 million in a single year, and almost all of that was a bonus.

Those are absolutely outrageous figures. They make me wonder why the Government feel it is necessary to lift the bonus cap at all, given the outrageous sums that are being paid.

That brings me to my second question, which was an attempt to discover who is actually pressing for a lifting of the cap on bonuses. Given the rates of remuneration I have just indicated, it would take a colossal amount of unrestricted greed for bosses in the banking sector to propose such a thing. However, according to The Guardian, sources in some of the City’s largest banks are saying, “Not me, guv. I didn’t ask for the cap to be raised.” Those bankers admitted that they were baffled by the then Chancellor’s plan, and I think that they are equally baffled by the current Chancellor’s decision to continue with the plan to lift the EU-imposed cap. The bankers said that they had not lobbied for the move, so it begins to look like this was an ideological move by the Conservative Government, who believe as a matter of faith in rewarding the super-rich with additional wealth.

[Jon Trickett]

The hon. Lady makes a number of important points, and I agree with most of them.

I was asking whether the Government are ideologically committed to this policy, since no banker is prepared to admit that they had lobbied for it. If that is the case, and it looks like it is, there is not a single shred of empirical evidence that money can trickle down from the most wealthy to the rest of society—quite the reverse. Beyond a certain point, it has been argued that the further growth of the finance sector hampers rather than supports the real economy. One study estimated that the excessive size of the UK’s financial sector may well have cost our economy £4.5 trillion in lost growth over a 20-year period.

Turning to my third question, there is no evidence to suggest that individualised reward systems for key decision makers are necessarily for the corporate good of the institution for which they work, let alone the common good of the country as a whole. An argument that the Government have developed is that if banks pay more bonuses, they will attract more bankers who will pay more tax. A better argument would be to pay those who are on the lowest pay more money because they will spend it in the local economy and contribute to income for the Treasury.

A Government who set out public policy to raise the incomes of the wealthiest while holding down the wages and salaries of working people are totally at variance with the values of the overwhelming majority of people in this country. How can they justify the multimillion remuneration packages for a handful of people at the top when the number of food banks for working communities is growing? In any event, it seems that avarice in the financial sector is simply piling up the material for the next crash, which will come if we do not change direction fast. The Government need to abandon this policy. That is just plain Yorkshire common sense.

I want to make one further point, and I will be careful how I express it—the House will understand why. The Code of Conduct for Members states:

“Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might influence them in the performance of their official duties.”

I quote that because 10% of all MPs have disclosed in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests that they have monetary ties with for-profit companies or individuals in the financial sector. The same is true of one fifth of all peers. I worry about how embedded the financial sector is in this very building. Financial institutions and individuals closely tied to the banking and finance sector donated a total of £15.3 million to political parties throughout 2020 and 2021.

Returning to bankers’ bonuses, the Government need to take three steps. First, they should immediately announce that they will not lift the cap on bonuses. Secondly, they should appoint an independent commission to examine the whole remuneration structure in the UK, starting with the financial sector. Thirdly, they should make an interim announcement that there will be a suspension of all bonus payments in the City during the current financial crisis, until the independent commission that I have recommended reports.

[Beth Winter]

In addition, does my hon. Friend agree that a windfall tax on the profits of the banks should be introduced as an alternative to a future round of austerity, as stated by the previous deputy governor of the Bank of England?

[Jon Trickett]

My hon. Friend has caught my next point. In the interest of social justice, the country feels that a 2% cap on the salaries of public sector employees and the lifting of the cap on already over-remunerated bankers is the wrong way for the Government to go. I agree with the statement made last week by the former deputy governor of the Bank of England, who my hon. Friend has just referred to. He said:

“The British government should raid the banks for tens of billions of pounds to fill a black hole in the public finances”.

He argued that the combination of rising interest rates and the money printed as part of quantitative easing has handed banks windfall profits. Those profits are going towards increased bonuses, which is totally unacceptable. Surely the banks and the financial sector should work for the common good, rather than for the private interests of a handful of very wealthy people. I will now make way for the Minister, and I look forward to him attempting to defend the indefensible.