Financial Services Industry

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Minister.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. That would be the normal course of events. It is possible for another hon. Member to speak if there is time to do so, but ordinarily that is on the understanding that the Member concerned has the agreement of the sponsoring Member and of the Minister. I am not sure whether the Minister’s agreement has been sought. If the Minister were content for the hon. Gentleman to speak, I think he would intend to do so extremely briefly. Is the Minister content?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

The Minister is an accommodating Minister, and therefore a suitable expression of gratitude I know will be forthcoming from the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood, Mr Mark Reckless.

[Mark Reckless]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I first clarify whether the time limit of half an hour or 7.30 pm applies? It is not entirely clear from the Order Paper.

[Mr Speaker]

The answer is very straightforward: until 7.30 pm. That is the factual position, but the norm in these circumstances is for agreement to contribute to have been achieved in advance. In this instance, in which the Minister is graciously agreeing to accommodate the hon. Gentleman—and it is a case of graciously agreeing—luck should not be pushed. I am always happy to hear the hon. Gentleman in an orderly way. On that basis, we will now hear his thoughts briefly.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have no intention of speaking at any great length or keeping the Minister from her dinner or from her very important duties.

My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell) talked about competition and breaking up a cosy cartel in banking. I have heard him use similar language about our political system. I think there is some commonality between what we see in banking and what we see in politics. I would like to add to his remarks on solvency II. As well as the risk of starving corporate sectors of credit they might otherwise receive, I have a concern that if there is a regulatory push to force insurers to hold Government bonds, particularly when they are required to hold those only within the eurozone for certain purposes, that actually may increase risk relative to holding diversified global corporate bonds.

I want to make three brief points. First, the barriers to entry in financial services, particularly banking, so often stem from regulation—in banking, there are minimum requirements in terms of assets, time and other things—and I credit the Minister, the Treasury and our regulators with reducing them in recent years. Will she give an assessment of how that has worked? Have we managed to relax the requirements without problems developing, and might it be possible to relax them further?

Secondly, the extent of competition in banking seems often to be the product of the state of the monetary cycle, whether globally or in a particular country. In the late 1980s, we saw what happened with the Japanese banks that kindly built Eurotunnel for us but made enormous losses in doing so. In the 2000s, we saw the explosion of credit, and particularly in this country, from 2001, we saw what happened in the inter-bank credit market and across Europe. In some ways, there were positives to that—for example, greater cross-border competition between banks in Europe—but it was driven by over-optimism about the eurozone and the state of monetary policy. Since we have retreated from that position, if anything the euro appears to have driven banks back to national markets, and it is the individual sovereign—the taxpayer—who has been required to bail out the banks, which I fear has reduced the competition we were otherwise seeing from that source.

Thirdly, my hon. Friend spoke about the limits and restrictions on the current account market. I am also concerned about the small and medium-sized enterprise market. A constituency case concerning the potential mis-selling of interest rate swaps and a company called Port Medway Marina has taught me that a small business can become so entangled with a bank that, when it gets into a dispute with the bank, even if over only one aspect of their relationship, it can be difficult to disentangle from the bank and move to another one. That is a limit on competition that I fear banks too often exploit. If the Minister could say something about that, I would be very grateful. I concur with my hon. Friend’s comments about her record in the Treasury.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his courtesy.