Bank Resolution (Recapitalisation) Bill [Lords]

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 22nd January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have no desire to detain the House for long, but I have some questions that I hope the Economic Secretary can address, continuing our conversation in the Delegated Legislation Committee earlier this week.

The Economic Secretary and I are both alumni of TheCityUK, so she will know that what financial services want most of all is certainty of regulation and decision making. They need to know that the playing field is level and predictable. While we are all patting ourselves on the back about Silicon Valley Bank, the consensus that everyone did a good job makes me slightly suspicious.

The Bank of England effectively made three decisions during the unravelling of Silicon Valley Bank that I want to put on the Economic Secretary’s desk for her to consider. Is more certainty required from the Bank of England on the triggering of those decisions?

First, the Bank of England denied Silicon Valley Bank short-term funding. SVB UK was solvent, as it would have to be as a UK subsidiary regulated by the Bank of England. It applied for £1.8 billion of short-term funding when it became clear that its parent company was in trouble. That funding was denied by the Bank of England, and I do not think there has ever been any significant examination of why the Bank took that decision.

Obviously, there was a run on Silicon Valley Bank, with depositors seeking to pull out their money, and the bank was unable to honour those withdrawals, which is why it applied for short-term funding. A possible alternative route could have been a temporary freeze on withdrawals and/or the provision of short-term funding, which could have allowed the bank to remain solvent in the UK. Understanding what triggered that decision, and how other banks in similar circumstances might be handled by the Bank of England in future, is key.

Secondly, as the shadow Minister said, the Bank of England initially decided to put Silicon Valley Bank UK into insolvency and rely on the £85,000 depositor guarantee and the £170,000 joint depositor guarantee. We do not know why the Bank changed its mind.

[Emma Reynolds]

I can tell I am going to enjoy discussing these matters with the right hon. Gentleman. I have looked into this since our exchange on Monday, and I want to clarify what happened on the Friday before the Monday in March 2023. The Bank of England issued a statement on the Friday evening saying that it intended to apply to the court to place SVB UK Ltd into a bank insolvency procedure, absent any meaningful further information. However, a buyer came forward over the weekend, which is what changed between the Friday and the Monday. It was judged to be both in the public interest and in the interest of SVB UK customers that this resolution on the Monday morning was preferable to the insolvency procedure that had been announced on the Friday.

[Kit Malthouse]

That is useful information about the Bank’s decision making. However, the Bank still decided to go for insolvency prior to a resolution mechanism. I find it hard to see that, within that 36-hour period, it had not canvassed whether there was a market for the bank. My point remains: if I were an investor or an overseas bank trying to establish and invest significant funds in a UK branch, I would like to understand why the Bank of England makes these decisions, and the criteria and parameters by which it is likely to make a decision either way. Then, of course, the final decision was taken to sell or transfer the bank to HSBC—for a minimal consideration, I think. I really want to understand what value was placed on that bank going to HSBC, as opposed to any of the other banks that might have been bidding for it.

At the heart of this is my worry about competition. When a bank is put in this resolution position, obviously it needs to move to another bank that has significant assets and can fulfil the rightful demands of its depositors to withdraw their funds. That will naturally be a bigger bank, and there is a possibility—although hopefully this will not happen, as we will not use resolution very often—that small, higher-risk challenger banks will find themselves unable to obtain short-term funding from the Bank of England because of their size, and will therefore be gobbled up by the leviathans of the banking system. Over time, there might be a natural move back towards where we were prior to all these challenger banks appearing—to having four or five massive banks that dominate the system in an uncompetitive way.

I am asking the Minister not necessarily to change the legislation, but to consider setting out in a code of conduct what consideration the Bank of England has to give to the competitive landscape when it is resolving a bank. When it transfers one small bank to another small bank as part of a resolution, for example, that wheel might be oiled with a bit of short-term funding, in the interests of maintaining that competitive landscape. The cost of that should not fall on the taxpayer; effectively, it should be a loan for repayment. One of the benefits, if you like, of the 2007-08 crash—one of the silver linings of that cloud—is that we have a much more diverse banking landscape than before. There was recognition that having these huge organisations that crash the entire global economy if they fail was dangerous for the western economy, and that a much more diverse landscape was therefore desirable. The problem with that, obviously, is that there is more inherent risk in those smaller banks. If there is more inherent risk, we are likely to see more resolution, and in time we may end up back where we were.

I support the Bill. I think that resolution is exactly the right way to go, and we should obviate the risk to the taxpayer. There are also negatives to the system, though, so I hope that the Minister, who I am sure will do the job with aplomb, will think carefully about the impact on the world of the Bank of England’s decision making and predictability; about what the Bank can do to provide transparency, whether through a code of conduct or indicators of practice; and about the impact of resolution on competition.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Minister.