Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Lord Barnett Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, I listened very carefully to what my noble friend the Minister said. I am extremely grateful to him for the extent to which he has accommodated the points made by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, of which I had the honour to be a member and to which the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, referred—and I entirely endorse his remarks. However, the remarks that the Minister has just made simply do not stack up. Before going into why that is so, let me put a little perspective on what we are doing today. It sounds very dry, arid, tedious and tiresome in many ways. Indeed, it is not a model of how to construct legislation, as my noble friend Lord Higgins pointed out. Nevertheless, it is testimony to the fact that the Government have listened attentively to what the parliamentary commission had to say, and what was said in the other place in response to it.

My noble friend the Minister has already raised matters wider than the amendment that we are discussing. He started to talk about the industry-wide separation power, which we were concerned about but which was not part of this group of amendments. We will come on to that later. In this country, we are suffering, as part of the wider world’s suffering, the after-effect of a most appalling global recession. There were a number of causes of that problem, but it is generally agreed that right at the heart of it was a banking meltdown. Nothing is more important, therefore, than to do whatever we can to ensure that a further banking meltdown in future is unlikely to occur and to ensure that, if it does occur, the damage will be much less than that caused in 2008 and thereabouts.

There are few pieces of legislation going through Parliament that are more important than this Bill. I am not saying that you can do everything with legislation—there are a number of wider issues. But you have to do whatever you can. It is a long time since this House has had such an important role in trying to ensure that it is put right. It is clear that the legislation that was introduced in the Commons and went through the other place was wholly inadequate, and as a testimony to that are all the amendments that we are discussing today and all the amendments that the Government have moved. It is up to this House to get the legislation right; that imposes a very great responsibility on us and we should look at the legislation in a non-partisan fashion.

The Minister rested his argument on the fact that the Vickers commission came up with this wheeze of ring-fencing. It was a compromise between full separation of commercial and retail banking and investment banking and just leaving it as universal banking. There are a number of problems with the idea of the ring-fence. As the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and others have pointed out, this is new territory and has never been done before. We do not know whether or not it will work. We know that separation can work. There was separation in the United States under the Glass-Steagall legislation from 1933 to 1999 when it was repealed and for most of that time it worked very satisfactorily. It was weakened as time went on as a result of the success of the American banks in lobbying various authorities in the United States to make exceptions here and amendments and changes there. We need to watch out for that. It was also weakened to some extent by the ingenuity of investment bankers in finding ways round it, to which the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, referred. Nevertheless, separation worked pretty well in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

I speak with some experience. It is now more than half a century since I was the principal writer of the Lex column in the Financial Times and I have been a close observer of the banking scene throughout that period. I recall that for most of that period we had a separation between what were called the joint stock banks, which engaged in retail and commercial banking for small businesses and so on, and the investment banks, which were not called that in those days—they were called merchant banks. They were completely separate and it worked very well, so we know that separation can work, and has worked, in the two major banking centres in the world.

It is true that the continent of Europe has always gone in for universal banking. That is so in Germany in particular but is generally the pattern in continental Europe. However, it is no accident that the two major banking centres of the world, London and New York, had separation. That worked. Whether this halfway house can work or not is very uncertain. Although the remarks of my noble friend Lord Blackwell on this amendment showed that he got completely the wrong end of the stick on it, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, pointed out, he was absolutely right to point to one of the problems, although not the only one, with the governance structure. It is a very curious governance structure in which the two subsidiaries of the holding company are together but separate. They are meant to be completely separate even though they both, as boards of directors, have responsibilities to exactly the same group of shareholders. It is a very odd system and we do not know the workings of it.

I say that my noble friend the Minister is unconvincing because his whole point rested on the fact that Vickers said the ring-fence is the right answer and that because Vickers said that we must stick with it and not change it. What we are saying, which is surely much more reasonable, is that we will, of course, give Vickers a chance. Indeed, we will try to reinforce his proposal by means of the so-called “electrification” procedures. However, if it is seen not to be working, we will have to go to separation. One member of the Vickers commission is already convinced that we should go to separation without any intermediate step but I am quite sure that nobody on the Vickers commission wishes to see a failure. Let us give Vickers a chance and see how it works but if it does not work—it has to be kept under review—we should go to full separation. That must be sensible. The fact that the Vickers commission said what it did is really no argument at all.

I am very glad to see the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in his place. He was a most distinguished member of our Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and I hope that he will contribute to our debates. One of the things that he has emphasised strongly—I have tried to explain the importance of this—is the problem around the culture of banking. This was accepted by Parliament when it set up the commission and, indeed, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister explicitly said that it was to deal with the culture.

One of the key problems is that retail and high-street banking—commercial banking—and investment banking are two completely separate cultures. It is very difficult, with the best will in the world. I am not against investment bankers, but I do not think they should be bailed out by the taxpayer. We may, from time to time, need to bail out the commercial banks, with their retail depositors and their responsibility for the payment system. They may need that, even though they have enhanced capital funds, but it is wrong, I think, ever to bail out investment banks; they should be like hedge funds, with a fear of failure restraining what they do. They will be imaginative, they will be adventurous, they will be creative, they will be exciting for those who are excited by this kind of thing, and they will have a totally different culture. To assume that you can get two quite separate cultures in the same entity is stretching it a bit. Therefore, we have to see how this will work. It may not work. If we are going to address this cultural problem we have to make sure we address it effectively.

We shall come on to the other amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, to which I have added my name, but on this major issue we have to strengthen the Bill in the way that the noble Lord highlighted, endorsed by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, for the Official Opposition. We have certainly not heard any good reason from the Minister why we should not do that.

[Lord Barnett (Lab)]

My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, who said in his introduction that he has never seen such a shambles presented to any House. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I had the misfortune for five years, as the noble Lord will know, to take two Finance Bills a year through, mainly because the first Bill had to be amended because it had not been properly scrutinised; it had been guillotined by all successive Governments. Yet I have never seen anything remotely like this Bill and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, and his staff, who have done a tremendous job in trying to present to us what exactly is going on here. It is very difficult when one is working without a group of secretaries, let alone one, to understand what the devil is going on.

It seems to me that every speaker we have heard so far, apart from the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, is stumbling towards the only real solution. We will have to debate fairly soon to settle whether the House agrees to separation—call it Glass-Steagall, call it what you like. However, while we are stumbling in this direction—I am not sure from what my noble friend on the Front Bench was saying whether our Front Bench is stumbling towards it as well—it seems inevitable to me that we have to decide this one, major issue. However many times this is reviewed, ring-fencing can never be the solution to the different cultures that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, referred to. It is quite impossible.

I do not want to take too much of the Committee’s time on this occasion, but we have to settle, once and for all, whether we agree with this ring-fencing idea. It is so complex that it makes the situation even worse, as we have heard in a number of debates. Until we settle this matter, we will go from amendment to amendment for years on end, and have reviews for years on end, getting nowhere at the end of it. I hope that we can have the major debate as soon as possible so that the House can decide.