Professional Standards in the Banking Industry

Debate between Ed Balls and Elizabeth Truss

Thursday 5th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

We return to the smears of the Chancellor and his aides. We have had answers to that question from the City Minister at the time, the Chancellor and Shriti Vadera. I have asked the Chancellor to provide the evidence or withdraw and apologise, and he cannot. That says quite a lot about the Treasury team that he leads.

It is our view that a comprehensive review of the whole culture of banking must start with the conduct of bankers and traders, look at the institutions in which they operate, and cascade outwards into the rules, corporate governance, industry approaches and regulatory and legal frameworks in which banks have done business in past decades. There are many important, searching questions that we need to answer, and the only way to answer them—I have them here, but for reasons of time I will not go through them all—is through the broad-based inquiry that we need, not a narrow, LIBOR-based inquiry.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman think it was a mistake to set up the tripartite regulatory structure, in which everyone and no one seems to have been responsible? He does not seem to know which part of his Government was doing what.

[Ed Balls]

When the Conservatives gave reasons in Parliament at the time for opposing the establishment of the new regulator, did they talk about the tripartite system? The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who was the lead on this issue at the time, said in 1999:

“Our concerns about the Bill may be said to fall into two general areas. The first is the very wide power still vested in the FSA and the danger that any concentrated executive power can lead to abuse.”

We know all about that from this Chancellor and his reforms.

“The second is the danger of over-regulation, with consequential damage to the United Kingdom’s position.” —[Official Report, 28 June 1999; Vol.334, c. 44.]

Perhaps the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) needs to go back and read the Hansard of the time.

The Government’s second objection to a full judicial inquiry is one of speed. As the Prime Minister said on Monday—

Jobs and Growth

Debate between Ed Balls and Elizabeth Truss

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

I will return to the hon. Gentleman and his party in a moment. They gave the Government some very good advice 18 months ago, but unfortunately it was not heeded.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman has talked about infrastructure and the A11. Labour cancelled the road-building programme, whereas we are breaking new ground on the A11. In addition, so much red tape was put in place that we are now 83rd in the world for regulation. Does he think that is helping small businesses in our country?

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Ed Balls and Elizabeth Truss

Thursday 24th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

I have studied the Chancellor’s new fiscal mandate. He says that he wants to get the national debt on a downward trend by the end of the Parliament. We had national debt on a downward trend in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Before the financial crisis hit, our national debt was lower than the debt we inherited from the Conservatives. [Interruption.] Hon. Members are barracking—but let me answer the hon. Gentleman, because at least he asked a serious question, unlike some of the nonsense we have heard from other hon. Members on the Government side of the House. The second part of the fiscal mandate is to get the budget, excluding investment—the current balance—back into balance by 2015. Yet that is the golden rule.

The golden rule is getting, over the cycle, the current budget, excluding investment, into balance. That never happened in the 1980s and the 1990s, but it happened for a sustained period under Labour. However, it is true that, throughout that period, we borrowed to invest. Of course we did. Our infrastructure—our schools and hospitals—had not been invested in for 20 or 30 years. Throughout the period before the financial crisis, national debt was below the level that we inherited from the previous Conservative Government.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Is not it the case that in 1997 Labour cancelled the road-building programme, which would have been an investment in infrastructure?

[Ed Balls]

If I remember rightly, our mistake was not to reverse the cancellation of the road-building programme that we inherited from the previous Government. We inherited an environment Department that did not want to build roads and a transport Department that had given up asking for transport investment. When we came into government it took time to build schools, because in the previous 18 years so few new schools had been built that local authorities had lost the capacity and the ability to build them. That is the reality.