Royal Bank of Scotland (FSA Report)

Debate between Frank Dobson and Mark Hoban

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

I think that we should give careful consideration to the idea of debarring people who have been incompetent and mismanaged their leadership of institutions. That applies to the directors of those institutions, but it may also apply to the politicians who designed the system in the first place.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Let me begin by declaring an interest: my wife and I have both current and deposit accounts with the Royal Bank of Scotland. As one who was always in favour of tougher regulation of banks, I must also confess that I do not recall encountering an organisation before the collapse which could be described as “Tories for tougher banking regulation”.

Will the Minister confirm that the failures extend beyond the area that he has covered? Will he confirm that the auditor, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu—which received substantial fees—did not seem to notice that there was anything wrong, and that the benighted rating agencies, which keep telling us what should be happening now, gave triple A ratings to both RBS and ABN AMRO right up to the day on which the balloon burst?

[Mr Hoban]

The right hon. Gentleman makes some important points, and clearly a number of institutions involved with RBS and the regulatory system more widely should bear responsibility for what happened, but let us be absolutely clear that the principal responsibility for the failure of RBS lies with its management.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Frank Dobson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Frank Dobson]

The Minister recently told me that the Government had made no assessment whatever of the money that might be raised by a transactions tax, as proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell)—a Robin Hood tax. If the Government have made no assessment of the money likely to be raised, how can they have meaningful discussions with international bodies about what the impact of the tax would be?

[Mr Hoban]

Significant studies have been done by both the EU and the IMF on such a tax, how it would work and the pitfalls in the proposals. We will see an impact assessment on that emerging shortly. We have not ruled out a financial activities tax. We are engaged in discussion with our international partners and we have pressed for the Commission to consider such a tax. It is working on that. We are making progress. Another review is not needed; there is sufficient work going on to explore the issue in significant detail. The amendment would impose more burdens on the Treasury and it would be better to allow that work to take its course.

Finance Bill

Debate between Frank Dobson and Mark Hoban

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Frank Dobson]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Hoban]

I want to make some progress. I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) has said that the debate may go on until any hour, but I do not want to be the cause of delaying the House’s tackling subsequent new clauses.

The vast majority of the cost of providing the proposed tax relief would go to those who already have private medical insurance, and there is therefore no obvious need for a new incentive. The case for introducing tax relief rests on the proposition that it would encourage significant new take-up of private medical insurance and ultimately be self-financing. However, at this stage we do not have any strong evidence to show how much additional take-up of private medical insurance a tax relief would generate, or how much pressure on NHS resources would be relieved as a result.

Indeed, when a similar relief existed between 1990 and 1997, it had little apparent effect. It is estimated that take-up of medical insurance increased only from 500,000 to 550,000 individuals over that period. The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) said that that increase was a demonstration of people’s lack of confidence in the NHS under the previous Conservative Government, but she ought to be aware that the take-up of private medical insurance under the Labour Government of whom she was a member went up from 550,000 to 1.7 million, so I do not think that her argument is particularly strong.

[Frank Dobson]

I congratulate the Minister on at least producing an estimate of the cost of the proposed measure. When the original scheme was first introduced, neither the Treasury nor the Department of Health made any estimate whatever; they were flying blind.

[Mr Hoban]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman; there are times when I am happy to accept congratulations from the other side of the House. We want to ensure, especially given the constraints that we are working under in these times of fiscal austerity, that measures can be well justified.

An Institute for Fiscal Studies report published in 2001 questioned how far the take-up of private medical insurance would ever respond to tax relief. It also suggested that the dead-weight cost would make it unlikely that tax relief could be self-financing.