Banking (Responsibility and Reform)

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes with concern that the recent Bank of England publication, Trends in Lending, shows that net lending to businesses has fallen in nine out of the last 12 months and by more than £10 billion in the last year; further notes that a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills report published on 2 February 2012 states that the stock of lending to small and medium-sized enterprises peaked in 2009 and in November 2011 declined by 6.1 per cent. compared to November 2010, whilst banks were frequently setting bonuses for their senior executives which were too large; believes that bank executive remuneration should be related to performance and that banks either directly or indirectly supported by the taxpayer must recognise that the taxpayer expects very large bonuses only to be paid to reflect genuine exceptional performance; notes with concern that the Government has not given due consideration to repeating the bankers’ bonus tax, in addition to the bank levy, to pay for 100,000 jobs for young people; calls on the Government to increase transparency, accountability and responsibility in the setting of pay in the banking sector, including through the immediate implementation of the Walker Review on corporate governance, and the placing of an employee representative on the remuneration committees of company boards; and further calls on the Government to reform the banking sector so that it better supports businesses and provides the credit they need to create jobs and growth.

I should like to take this opportunity to tell the House that I have been informed that the Business Secretary is not able to be here today because he is at a funeral. I am sure that the whole House will want to join me in wishing him well on this sad day.

The subject of the motion, responsibility and reform in the banking sector and in the wider economy, has been a matter of immense public interest of late and is one on which many Members have already spoken out. Let us be clear—I think I speak for most Members when I say this—that in speaking out on these issues hon. Members simply reflect the strong views expressed by our constituents on the subject.

The Labour party’s starting point is this: we are proud of our financial services centre, the City of London being arguably the world’s leading financial services centre. I, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who will make the Opposition’s winding-up speech, and many other Members are, I know, proud to have spent time working in the City of London before being elected to this place.

The City helps to give the country a competitive edge, thanks to the talent that we have here, our time zone, our company law, our jurisdiction and the free flow of capital in London. The financial services sector as a whole employs more than 1 million people nationally and makes up 10% of our total national income, but no witness to recent history could claim with credibility that the sector has functioned as British businesses, our economy and our society as a whole would have wanted over the past few years.

Ultimately, the fault for that lies with a minority of those working in the sector, but as the party in government through much of that period we, along with others in power throughout the world, must, and we do, accept with humility that we should have better regulated the sector, because dysfunction in the banking sector here and globally led to the financial crisis of 2008-09, to the recession that followed and to its aftermath. That recession, the gestation of which is found in the banking sector, is something for which the British people are still paying.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware that the current structures were set up following the closure of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International 20 years ago. There remain within the Treasury the confidential parts of the Bingham report. Does he think that it is time that those confidential parts were published? That would give us a better understanding of exactly what went wrong in the biggest collapse of a bank in British history.

[Mr Umunna]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. I know that that is something for which he has campaigned for a long time.

We all know the facts. From the middle of 2007, the losses sustained on securities backed by sub-prime mortgage assets led to a credit crunch. That credit crunch came about due to a loss of counterparty confidence and uncertainty about which financial institutions held toxic assets. Depressed asset prices and increased losses led to serious solvency issues in major banks here and in the United States.

In the US, Bear Stearns had to be rescued by J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and AIG was nationalised in 2008 by that well known socialist, the 43rd President of the United States, George Bush. Here, Northern Rock had already been nationalised by the Labour Government by 2008. Later that year, we put in place a £500 billion package of measures designed to recapitalise the banks. That included the special liquidity scheme and inter-bank lending guarantees. The Labour Government took stakes in two of our biggest banks so that, by the end of 2009, the Government held a stake in Lloyds of just over 40% and a stake in RBS that increased to more than 80%.

For all the criticism that is often heaped on my right hon. Friends the Members for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) and for Kircaldidy—sorry, for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown)—by Government Members, I believe that we owe a debt of gratitude to them both for the decisive action that they took to save the system from itself, to secure people’s savings and to ensure that the people we represent could continue to withdraw money from cash machines in the wall. The Opposition are proud of what they achieved.

As the Independent Commission on Banking stated:

“without the intervention of national authorities around the world—requiring taxpayers to incur significant direct costs and larger contingent liabilities—the consequences of the crisis would have been immeasurably worse.”

It is for that reason that this House has every right to take an interest in remuneration and reform in the banking sector. After all, our banks still benefit from an implicit taxpayer subsidy if they fail.