Banks: Business Lending

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Wednesday 28th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, my noble friend has raised this theme on a number of occasions. It is for the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England to decide how it operates the asset purchase facility—so-called quantitative easing. What we are talking about this morning is how we increase the supply of net lending by banks to United Kingdom businesses. As I said, the Government announced in the Budget a range of measures and have set out an important discussion document, to which I hope noble Lords who wish to will contribute their views by 20 September.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, the Minister has referred to the Green Paper on two occasions. Is he aware that an official identified it as very green because it reflected the inability of the Business Secretary to convince the Chancellor to adopt a more constructive approach to this issue? Does this not reflect usual tensions within the coalition? Does the noble Lord also recognise that the Budget has been received in such a way as to reduce the level of demand in this country rather than increase it?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, it is not very productive to reduce everything to trying to find chinks of light between different parts of the coalition. It would be more helpful to have a substantive discussion about the Green Paper. It was published under the joint signatures of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Chancellor of the Exchequer and sets out a wide-ranging agenda of possible measures to increase lending to business. As I said, I encourage anybody with views on it to contribute to the debate over the summer.