Banking Commission Report

Lord Darling of Roulanish Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Darling (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

I welcome the Vickers report and I am glad to hear that it is being implemented, but will the Chancellor be careful about overselling this? This would not have stopped the failure of Northern Rock or HBOS, and the idea that a future Government might decline to step in and rescue an investment bank if it failed is simply not credible. Look what happened to Lehmans when the Americans tried that. So these problems have not gone away. Will he accept that if his reforms of the Bank of England are to work, he has to look at the governance of the Bank, as the Treasury Committee recommended recently? The Bank made some bad mistakes in the past and we have to face up to that, just as we have faced up to the mistakes of the Financial Services Authority. Will he urgently accept the need for European Governments to shore up their banks, because there is very real risk, if we have a sovereign default in the next few weeks, that their banks will be affected because they are not adequately capitalised? If he is still on speaking terms with his opposite numbers, that is something that he should attend to very quickly.

[Mr Osborne]

I can assure the former Chancellor that we are still on speaking terms. Indeed, I had an hour and a half conference call just before I came into the Chamber, so I can promise him that a lot of speaking is still going on. The question he rightly asks is: where is the action? The eurozone has taken a number of important steps, but we still need to see a more credible firewall, which will enable it to stand behind its banks even more effectively.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s specific point about the Bank of England and whether this could have prevented what happened when he was Chancellor, of course institutions can get things wrong, and the Bank of England got things wrong in the run-up to the crisis, but it is sensible to try to have one body that is looking at both the prudential risks in individual firms and the overall systemic risks in the economy. The tripartite system clearly failed to do that. I do not think that before he became Chancellor it met in person at a principal level, or perhaps only once. The system did not work and many Committees of this House have pointed that out. For the Bank of England to have clear responsibility for monitoring risks is sensible. As to whether all this could have prevented what happened, I draw attention to two points. First, there are higher capital requirements in Vickers that would have better protected banks such as HBOS, and, secondly—the biggest challenge of all that he had to face—it is precisely the collapse of a large universal bank such as the Royal Bank of Scotland that Vickers is seeking to address. No one pretends that it is easy, but we believe, Vickers believes and many others believe, that the idea of ring-fencing the retail operations focused on the UK will give the Chancellor of the day greater opportunity to protect what really matters to the UK economy without having to resort to bailing out the entire institution.