Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Roberta Blackman-Woods and Andrew Love

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Love]

I congratulate my next-door neighbour and right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on a very competent speech.

It will not come as a surprise to those in the Chamber that I support the amendment. I support it primarily because there is so much public interest in and concern about bankers’ bonuses and the contribution being made by bankers when we are all supposed to be pulling our weight. I also support it for the reason given by the shadow Minister: a peculiarity of our system is that we cannot amend upwards any proposal in the Finance Bill, and the amendment offers an alternative way to look critically at the levy by proposing a review, which is not unreasonable. By December, we should have some idea of how it is working.

The most important feature of the amendment, as discussed earlier, is that it asks for a report to be published that can be debated by this House. Because of the importance of the issues involved, that is critical. The report will include an account of how the rate and the threshold were decided. As we have watched the measure’s development over the past few months, we have started to have a sneaking suspicion that Ministers decided what amount of tax should be paid by the banks and then worked back to what the threshold and the rate should be. I will come back to that point later.

Much has been said by Opposition Members about the measure’s adequacy. It is right to say that it will not raise as much as the bank bonus tax did and it is felt widely, within the House and outside, that the levy does not reflect the contribution that bankers ought to make. That relates to new subsection (2)(c) in the amendment. I will come back to bankers’ bonuses, because they have an important implication for the contribution that bankers should make.

In what the Government propose, we are being asked to agree to a levy on UK banks and building societies and on the UK operations of foreign banks. It is estimated that it will affect between 30 and 40 institutions, covering all the largest financial services institutions in the City of London and throughout the country. That proposal seems reasonable, but it is important that it is reviewed to see whether it is appropriate.

The tax will be levied on what the Chancellor termed the wholesale funding of banks, which is the liabilities and equity minus a number of items that are considered safe, such as tier 1 capital and insured retail deposits. I think that we are being asked to agree that that will incentivise the use of prudent balance sheets, rather than risky balance sheets. Of course, the wholesale funding that the Chancellor talked about was a major cause of the difficulties in the credit crunch. We all remember the collateralised debt obligations and the exotic funding regimes, although I do not think that any of the major institutions are into any of that now. The proposal, which mirrors the proposal that was discussed internationally, is intended to incentivise our banks to hold safer liabilities than they held before.

Many Opposition Members have commented on the threshold of the tax, which has been set at £20 billion. I hope that the Minister will respond to the concern that that figure is far too high. The rate has been a moveable feast, and there have been many different rates and proposals. As was mentioned earlier, the Chancellor got up one morning—it just happened to be the day of Treasury questions—and announced another change. Changes have also been announced presumably because of corporation tax, and there has been concern that the rate may have been raised as a result of the failures of Project Merlin, which I will talk about later. We have had many different threshold rates, and I ask the Minister to clarify how we reached all those rates, where we are now and how much money the levy will raise. It is suggested that it will raise between £2.5 billion and £2.8 billion, which, as other Opposition Members have said, seems a very low figure in the present situation. I hope that he will respond to that concern.

What is the levy meant to achieve? Supposedly, it deals with a number of matters. First, numerous speakers have mentioned the implicit public subsidy that we provide to banks. The Bank of England has done some work and suggests that there is a £100 billion subsidy; others have suggested lower figures, but there is consensus that the figure is very substantial. If the bank levy will raise only one twentieth or one fortieth of that sum, that puts the matter in context.

To pick up on a point that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) made, the bank subsidies make life for new entrants to the marketplace—they are called challenger banks—very much more difficult, as they do not have any of those subsidies, reflecting the idea of banks being too important to fail. That notion should be the crux of our discussion about the financial services sector, because it raises the question of moral hazard: will banks that are too important to fail take riskier decisions, as happened in the lead-up to the credit crunch? I would like the Minister to explain how those issues relate to the levy. We understand that it will provide only part of the contribution that has to be made, but what contribution will that be?

I mentioned banks being incentivised to hold less risky liabilities. The reason for that is clear: if things go wrong, it is not just the financial services sector that is affected. Unlike other industries, in which problems affect other companies in the same industry, if the financial services sector hits difficulties, the whole economy is hit, as we found out to our great cost in 2007. It is critical that we reduce the possibility of that contagion happening in future.

We must deal with a number of issues peculiar to our financial services sector. Many believe that too much is concentrated in four or five very large banks and that as a result there is not sufficient competition. I will not go into the details of the Banking Commission’s report or the most recent Treasury Committee report, but those who have read them will know that both have strongly suggested that consumers do not have a great deal of choice in our banking system, that the banks are too concentrated and that it is very difficult for new banking companies to come into being. There is not sufficient competition and, by common consent, the cost is that banks make excessive profits. The levy should tax those profits. I would like the Minister to say whether he believes it will do that sufficiently.

To return to a point that I made a few moments ago, in the light of the subsidy given to the banks—£50 billion is one suggestion, £60 billion is another and the Bank of England says it is £100 billion—a levy of £2.5 billion, which is between a twentieth and a fortieth of that subsidy, does not seem to address the problem that we face. Why does the Minister believe that the measure answers the concern about the financial services sector?

I could be more generous and suggest that the Government are moving in the right direction. After all, all the changes in the rate of the banking levy have been increases—from 0.07%, to 0.075%, and for longer held assets, from 0.04% to 0.05%. I think I got those right, but I would be unsurprised if someone stood up and said, “You’re wrong. It’s changed,” or if I woke up tomorrow to find that the Chancellor had re-announced the rate. Those changes have raised the take from the levy by £200 million or £300 million, so that £2.5 billion will be raised in the first year. However, as I said at the start of my speech, given how the £20 billion threshold was constructed and the rate changes, we cannot escape the conclusion that the Government have set the overall amount that they wish to take and then gone back to work out the threshold and the rate. I should like the Minister to explain why that is not the case.

Of course, critically, at £2.5 billion or £2.8 billion, the levy does not raise as much as the bank bonus tax, so the suggestion—I put it no stronger than that—is that the banks are getting off lightly. The corporation tax reduction—corporation tax seems to have been constructed because the banks do not invest a great deal but have high turnover—and other changes could have been ideally designed for the banks. There is therefore a suspicion that banks are doing really rather well out of this year’s Budget. If that is not so, I should like the Minister to tell us why not.

There are many good reasons why the Minister should have been more draconian in introducing the levy. After all, as has been said by many hon. Members, when the coalition parties were in opposition, they told us that negotiations between the Government and the banking industry on proposals such as Project Merlin would produce certain results; on bonuses, however, the Government got absolutely nowhere. Statements were made about constructive negotiations, so it was embarrassing to find bankers telling us that there was no change.

Of course, still more critically, we were told that small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy—that mainly small businesses in the private sector would make a reality of the Government’s so-called strategy of getting the private sector to take up the slack created in the public sector. If they are to achieve that, they need to grow.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

May I draw my hon. Friend back to the use of the bank bonus tax to promote growth? We heard last week that the construction industry was struggling to come out of the recession. Of course, applying the bonus tax and giving it to the construction sector to, for example, build affordable homes, which are very much needed in my constituency and many others, would have helped to stimulate the economy.

[Mr Love]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Clearly, the sector of the economy that has lost out the most is construction. If the Government intend to contribute only the homes bonus and changes to the planning regulations to the construction industry—they are creating uncertainty up and down the country—I foresee a bleak future for the construction sector in the next two to three years. I urge the Government to consider that carefully. They say they have a growth strategy but they do not, and we are now suggesting one. It would repay them to listen to what people are saying and to address the inadequacies of their response, particularly in the construction sector.