Royal Bank of Scotland

George Kerevan Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Quin]

I have a lot of faith in the regulatory system that Ministers have put in place over the past five or six years under the coalition Government and this Government. What we need to focus on, as a House, is ensuring that we have the regulatory system that will deliver the results for our constituents and for the broader UK economy. I am nervous that the motion proposed by the hon. Member for Edmonton, although well intentioned, would delay support going into the economy.

I was serving in the Treasury when the stake in RBS was originally taken. I know that no hon. Member would be under any illusion that that stake was ever taken in a leisurely manner with a view to getting a tidy investment. The decision was taken by Labour with the very best of intentions, and it was the right decision to support the UK economy and the UK banking system at an absolutely critical moment.

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s experience at the time, does he agree that there is still nevertheless an onus on the Treasury to ensure that the money paid out in acquiring RBS is paid back in full to the taxpayer?

[Jeremy Quin]

I understand the attraction of that argument. The hon. Gentleman is an economist of fine standing, and his point, which was also made by the hon. Member for Edmonton, is one to which we would all like the answer yes, but it is not as simple as that. The reality is that the value of a share is what people are prepared to pay for it. We know what the value of RBS is at present. A lot of actions were taken within RBS that might have been right for the UK economy but not have added to the value of the share price. If we are expecting RBS to act in the interests of the UK, that may not always be right for their share price.

[Jeremy Quin]

I will, but let me make one final point in rebutting the point made by hon. Member for East Lothian (George Kerevan), and then I am sure the hon. Gentleman will have another go. The Rothschild report is thorough—it is bigger than the two pages produced by the Governor of the Bank of England—and sets out why the taxpayer can expect to at the very least break even and probably make an overall profit on their investment in the banking system. That is a remarkable achievement, given that back in 2009, when the Labour party was in government, the Treasury was talking about a £20 billion to £50 billion loss.

[George Kerevan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for letting me back in. I simply asked him whether he felt, given his experience, that the goal should be to try to maximise the return to the taxpayer, given what they put in. I accept they might not get it all back, but should not the goal be to maximise the return to the shareholder, who is the taxpayer?

[Jeremy Quin]

Of course, we must maximise the returns, but we must do so in the context of the broader picture for the UK. I acknowledge that the banking system is incredibly important to our economy, including what it can provide to the real economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bailey]

I broadly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s thesis, but I do not think that he would agree with mine: that if we had the sort of financial services industry that was focused in the right direction, it would not really matter anyway what progress they were making.

[George Kerevan]

Is it not ironic that the Government are privatising the UK Green Investment Bank, which is a de facto regional investment bank with its headquarters in Edinburgh, and are instead about to invest £2 billion in the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to provide local area funding for infrastructure and companies in Asia?

[Mr Bailey]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention reinforces the sheer incoherence, inconsistency and irony of the Government’s policies towards the financial sector.

I want to speak for a few moments about small and medium-sized enterprises. The Government talk about rebalancing the economy, first from service industries to manufacturing and then from London and the south-east to other regions. If we look at the economy, we see that that must be done through SMEs. They constitute 90% of our businesses, 60% of employment and 50% of output. Although those in manufacturing may represent only 12% of our total GDP, they are hugely significant and crucial to driving up productivity and in our export performance, which are key pillars in driving forward our economy.

It would be reasonable to look at our financial services sector to see what it delivers to help to drive forward the economy. Finance and investment are the fuel for this engine of growth, but the problem is that the fuel is flowing in exactly the wrong direction. Despite Government schemes to boost investment loans to small businesses, the number of such loans has declined. The level of lending is highest in London, which has the smallest manufacturing sector and the largest service sector, and lowest in the regions, where there is a higher proportion of manufacturing. Take my own region of the west midlands, the region with the highest manufacturing output: it receives 9% of investment while London receives 20%.

As was articulated by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton, one of the reasons behind the situation is the decline of branch banking. We have an over-centralised system. The demise of local banking and the growth of digitalisation have led to a consequential reduction in the local knowledge and insight required to understand the needs of both local communities and local business.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

I associate myself with the comments from hon. Members congratulating the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on securing the debate. The advantage of having this debate is that we have moved the agenda forward, rather than looking back. Yes, we have castigated and held RBS to account, but the Minister should also note that Members on both sides of the House want to move the banking agenda forward.

We have spent seven or eight years, in the Treasury Committee and in the House, trying to refashion the regulatory machinery. In fact, the new regulatory machinery is yet to come into force, because it will be another two years before most of Vickers and the ring-fencing is in force, and another four years before it is fully operational. That means that we will have spent more than a decade trying to sort out the problems of 2007, and when we get there, we will discover that economic and banking problems have moved forward. Therefore, the advantage of today’s debate is that we have tried to start moving the agenda beyond 2007. I think that the Government should bear that in mind. That is why the motion, despite being drafted in very general terms, expresses the will of the House, which is that we need to look forward at how we can make the banking system more responsive, rather than simply protecting it from replicating the previous bubble.

I associate myself with the words of the hon. Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) and my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Dr Monaghan). In criticising the strategy pursued by various managements of RBS, which hopefully was largely in the past, we should never extend the criticism to the work done by the ordinary workers in the branches and call centres. They have struggled to cope with the crisis of 2007-08, and with the various restructurings that have taken place. I remind Members that employment in RBS was around 200,000 when it was taken into public ownership, and now it is about 92,000, so there has been a massive shedding of labour.

[Ian Blackford]

It is interesting that my hon. Friend is referring to the challenges that some of the staff at Royal Bank of Scotland have faced. They are fully deserving of our support. Does he agree that we should reflect on the employees of RBS and other banks who were encouraged by their managements to own shares pre-the crisis, and who, among others, have suffered parlously from the mistakes by those managements?

[George Kerevan]

My hon. Friend, and old friend, makes a very good point. There is not a wall between the customer and the rank and file staff of RBS; they too are customers and shareholders, and they too suffered.

That brings me to where we go next. I do not think that Members of this House would stand in the way of returning RBS to private ownership. When the Minister replies, she must not define our difference of opinion as being that the Government support a return to private ownership while the rest of us are demanding that RBS stay in the public sector. That is not the issue. The issue is the emphasis placed by the Treasury and the various Treasury agents in their approach to the various generations of management in RBS. In public ownership, the key goal given to RBS management was to pay down the level of debt—to reduce the balance sheet. During that period, RBS reduced its balance sheet by some £1.3 trillion. To put that in numbers that people can understand, it is equivalent to the entire balance sheet of Lloyds plus the entire balance sheet of Standard Chartered.

Achieving that has required the management of RBS to focus only on internal issues. Of all the weaknesses that have been identified by Members—I agree with all of them—the central weakness is that the management has concentrated on RBS’s problems and not on the customer. I will explain how I would crystallise this debate for the Minister. In choosing when and how to send RBS back to private ownership, the test must not be, “Did we get all our money back? Is the Treasury satisfied? Has the balance sheet been paid down to a certain amount?”; it must be the impact on the customer and whether RBS has returned to a customer-led focus. I think that the current chief executive, Ross McEwan, and his staff are struggling to do that. Since the senior management was changed two years ago, there has been some refocusing. I remind the Minister that the proximate reason for the change in chief executive was that the then chief executive had disagreed with the pressure that he was being put under to get the bank ready for full privatisation when he was saying, “No, we need to restructure in favour of getting the bank ready to meet the needs of the customer.” The test is not about ideological machismo—are we in favour of private ownership or public ownership?—but the fact that the bank can be privatised and move forward only when it is capable of winning back its customers and its customers’ confidence.

The fundamental break with RBS’s customers has been the loss of faith of its small business customers. That has not changed; we have heard a number of examples today. Whether or not RBS was ultimately culpable, through the global restructuring group, in driving viable businesses to the wall, that is what RBS’s customers feel happened. Until that is resolved, the bank will never become the bank that we all want that can drive the economy forward.

The Government have to be very careful about how they approach privatisation in case they further break the confidence of small businesses. In August, when there was the first wave of privatisation in which the Government started to sell off their shares, that produced bad headlines yet again. I personally think there was evidence of short selling. The Treasury certainly lost more money than it needed to in trying to sell off 5% of shares. That brought further bad headlines, which cannot be allowed to happen again.

At this stage in the game, after seven to eight years of constant restructuring at RBS, it will not be easy to start again and ask RBS management and staff to have a whole new business model. We might come to that point, but I give a word of caution. If we look at the long and sorry history of the attempt to hive off Williams & Glyn, which is a disaster still waiting to happen, we will see that it is not possible simply to wave a magic wand and break up RBS into a dozen or so regional banks. I believe we need to create regional and stakeholder banks, but breaking up RBS may be more difficult than some Members imagine.

Williams & Glyn was not a standalone bank—it was a brand that was totally integrated into RBS. Hiving it off again has taken so long that the original investor, Santander, walked away. The RBS management has been forced to enter into a bizarre arrangement with Corsair Capital, which is an interesting name for the partner RBS has joined in order to bring in capital to Williams & Glyn and then float it off. I do not think that RBS will make any money when it is floated off, so the taxpayer and the Treasury will not get any more money back. Corsair Capital is an American group with a long history of consolidation in the banking world, so I do not think it will be very long before Williams & Glyn is bought by somebody else, precisely so that the Corsair group makes a return on its money and effort. In the end, therefore, we will be no further forward when it comes to small businesses.

I am being chided by you, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will be brief in offering some practical suggestions.

[Ian Blackford]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[George Kerevan]

I will not take another intervention, because I am mindful of the time.

The Government have to rethink the idea of extending the new bank surcharge, which they have applied to the larger banks, to the smaller banks and mutuals. If we want to strengthen the mutual stakeholder section, we need to reduce the bank surcharge on it.

There is a growing issue—we have not mentioned this today, but it is beginning to emerge in the banking community—of access to the interlink payment system that binds together all the banks. The electronic system, which relates to cashline machines, standing order payments and contactless payments in a shop, is commonly owned by the big banks, but it is very difficult for smaller banks, new challenger banks and, ultimately, stakeholder banks to access it. We need to open it up. Finally, we need to open up the pricing structure so that SMEs can see how much it costs them to run accounts with a bank

Members on both sides of the House have collectively offered suggestions to the Government. There should be no rush to judgment. Let us think about what we are doing. RBS must have a customer-led focus and we should not just look at what the Treasury wants to do in order to get its money back.