Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Lord Sharkey Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey]

My Lords, there are lots of things about the banking system that need reforming, and I would like to talk about four that do not feature yet, or enough, in this Bill—payday loans, central counter parties, the payments system and the whole area of competition in general.

Let me turn first to payday loans. I think all noble Lords will recognise the justified concerns about payday lending. It is true that the Government are alive to these concerns and that the FCA will take over responsibility for regulating this sector in April next year. But that is eight months away and, in the mean time, the use of payday loans continues to grow alarmingly. In a Written Answer on 1 July, the Government estimated that payday lending had risen from £900 million in 2008-09 to £2.2 billion in 2011-12, with around 8 million new loans. Your Lordships will recall that Wonga recently increased its interest rates from just over 4,000% to just over 5,000%.

This is all pretty depressing, but the real situation may be much worse. The Government have no plans to monitor stock of payday lending until the FCA takes over in April next year, when they will think about it. This seems wrong. I can confirm to the noble Lords, Lord Higgins and Lord Watson of Invergowrie, that the Government have announced today that they have arranged for the banks to publish disaggregated lending figures by postcode quarterly from December this year. Why cannot we do exactly the same for payday lending? We will certainly look to amend the Bill to make this possible.

Perhaps even more worrying than lack of accurate and timely data is the Government’s ambivalence about the whole sector. I understand their concerns about driving borrowers to loan sharks, but the fact is that there is a successful model already well established of imposing strict limitations on payday lenders. In Florida, the state strictly regulates payday loans. There is a maximum borrowing limit of $500 at any one time. You can have only one loan outstanding, and this is tracked and enforced by a state-wide database of all loans taken out. The maximum fee is 10% plus a $5 verification fee, with no rollovers without having paid off the previous loan and a wait of 24 hours before applying for a new one. The software that does all this is available for implementation in the UK right now. I am sure we will want to consider in Committee the merits of having a similar regime in the UK.

The second area of concern is to do with the regulation of central counter parties, the small number of exchanges through which derivatives and derivative-type products must now be traded. Concentration of these trades into a small number of exchanges had the objective of increasing transparency and therefore predictability and therefore stability. It is quite possible that this concentration may have the opposite effect. If our banks are too big to fail, Andy Haldane of the Bank of England has pointed out that CCPs are,

“too big to fail on steroids”.

If the primary purpose of the Bill before us can be seen, as the BBA rather optimistically asserts, as,

“the final step in financial stability orientated measures”,

it is by no means clear how this Bill contributes to the stability or the resolution of CCPs or how it reduces exposure for the taxpayer. Perhaps it was not intended to, but we need to address these issues somewhere.

The third area of concern is the payments system, which essentially means VocaLink. This is the system, owned by the banks, which makes all money and credit transfers happen. It has two products—faster payments and BACS, one very fast, one remarkably slow. There are fundamental problems with this system as it stands. Leaving aside the question of who has the use of your money when it is slow in transit—when it has left your account but has not reached the recipient’s account—there are issues of competition, ownership and innovation here. The large shareholders in VocaLink have typically charged a premium for smaller banks to have access to the system. The Government are doing something about this, but the abuse of power by the large bank shareholders does not stop there.

The big bank owners of VocaLink have no incentive to innovate. Indeed, they have every reason to avoid innovation. VocaLink itself says in its observations on the Bill that,

“there are few incentives (owing to the pricing structures, length of contracts and commercial arrangements in place) for VocaLink, the payment schemes themselves or the end user banks to invest in innovations”.

Here “end user banks” really means big owner banks. You can see why they do not want to innovate. It would probably cost only between £25 million and £50 million to develop new, better, faster, more comprehensive payment systems. But because the banks’ IT systems are essentially clapped out and starved of investment, it would cost each bank hundreds of millions to upgrade its systems to implement new services. Of course, in any really competitive, customer-focused market, at least one bank would do just this, but our big banks are not competitive and certainly not customer- focused and they do not do any of this. They do not even invest in their current IT systems enough to stop them falling over. This is cartel-like behaviour—and I will return to the issue of competition in more detail in a moment. The fact is that the banks should not own or control the payments system, and we need to fix that. I think I heard the Minister say that the Government will bring forward amendments to do just that, which is very welcome. I look forward to discussing those amendments when they appear in Committee.

Before I leave the financial plumbing system, I would like to touch briefly on the issue of account portability. There has been progress on this. The new current account switching service will be available from September and mobile to mobile payments from 2014. This is a good thing as far as it goes. But, again, the fact is that we could do much better without the cartel-like involvement of the big banks. For example, under the proposed account switching arrangements, know your customer checks will still have to be carried out by the new bank, as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, said. This will delay switching for many retail accounts and is virtually certain to delay switching for all SME accounts. It need not be like this. Know your customer checks could be the responsibility of the plumbing system of a newly liberated VocaLink, and so could all the details of direct debits and other payments. How nice it would be if the banks were really forced to compete to service these consumer packages. This is an issue that we will certainly want to return to in Committee.

What many of the previous areas I have mentioned have in common is competition or, rather, the lack of competition. This is the final area that I want to talk about. I strongly agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, said on this subject. Our banking system is not even remotely competitive. Four big banks control more than 80% of the market, and it is this problem which is a key driver of many of our other problems with the banks’ behaviour—resistance to change, corruption, criminality and incompetence. It is worth reminding ourselves, very briefly, of the most recent scandals: the collapse of HBOS; the fixing of LIBOR; the involvement of Standard Chartered and HSBC in sanctions-busting and drug money laundering; the failure of the RBS payment systems last summer; and, last week, Barclays being fined half a billion dollars in the United States for allegedly rigging the gas markets. All this is compelling evidence of corruption, criminality and incompetence.

However, these are not the worst things. The very worst scandal, an almost unbelievably bad scandal, is the mis-selling of PPI policies. This scandal was the worst for three reasons. First, it was absolutely huge. The banks are going to have to pay at least £16 billion, and perhaps £30 billion, to settle the claims made against them. Secondly, it was not just one bank; it was lots of banks. But, most of all, it is worst because it was deliberate exploitation of their customers. It is worth quoting what John Lanchester recently said in the LRB about the PPI scandal. He said:

“PPI was about banks breaking trust by exploiting their customers, not accidentally but as a matter of deliberate and sustained policy. They sold policies which they knew did not serve the ends they were supposed to serve and in doing so, treated their customers purely as an extractive source”.

The PPI scandal is the clearest possible indication that the banks do not have their customers’ interests at heart—the opposite seems to be the case. It is precisely the lack of effective competition that has allowed the banks to develop and maintain this corrupt culture.

The Government are alive to all this and so, to an extent, are the banks themselves. The Government would like to see a more diverse and competitive banking landscape and have made important moves to produce this. In particular, it will be easier to set up new banks and this will help. They would like to see the equivalent of the Sparkasse here in the UK. That would help, too. P2P lending may also help, although I should say in passing that I am very alarmed to see Santander muscling in on Funding Circle. It is very hard to see how this would increase diversity in our banking landscape. But all this is very small and very gradual. It would take decades and decades before any of this had any real effect on the big banks’ market share.

The banks themselves offer two sorts of solutions. One is better, more ethical cultures and better, more ethical leadership. However, it is hard to be convinced that this would be sufficient. At the time that HSBC was busting UN sanctions and laundering drug money, it had an Anglican clergyman in charge of it. The other solution is better regulation. The Government agree with this and in this Bill and in the Financial Services Act put enormous faith in the ability of smarter, stricter regulation to help solve the problem. I am convinced that regulation will help a great deal but I am equally convinced that on its own it will not solve the problem. In fact, I do not think the problem with our banks can be solved unless we make them really competitive and really focused on serving their customers. How we might do this, we will want to discuss in detail as the Bill progresses, but we do need to do something radical. At the moment, our banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to trust and too big to manage. We should not believe that they are also too big to break up.