Banking (Responsibility and Reform)

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

May I thank the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) for his remarks about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills? I am sure that the whole House will identify with them.

I welcome the opportunity to debate business lending and the reform of the British banking system. As hon. Members are well aware, we face extremely tough economic circumstances as we weather the ongoing crisis in the eurozone and fix the underlying damage that the previous Government inflicted on the economy.

The UK banking sector in particular faces a long and difficult road to repair, unwinding the irresponsible and unsustainable excesses of the previous decade. In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis in almost a century, bank balance sheets are shrinking under market and regulatory pressure. It is absolutely right that we ensure that our banks build their capital and liquidity reserves in these turbulent times. It was because of that action that all our banks passed the European Banking Authority stress tests.

It is stability that we are safeguarding for the long term by discarding the shadow Chancellor’s discredited tripartite system and implementing the recommendations of the Vickers committee. It is this Government who are ensuring that we build a stable financial sector with the capacity and the market confidence to provide sustainable lending to our most innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial private sector firms.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Given that the Minister feels that the industry is more stable, is he concerned to hear the chief executive of the National Australia bank, which owns the Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks, say today that the bank might have to consider selling, or at least restructuring, the business—partly because the UK Government’s austerity programme has contributed to the harsh business environment, which is why the bank is carrying out a review?

[Mr Hoban]

The reason we have to have the austerity programme in place is to tackle the mess left by the Labour party when it was in government.

As I was saying, we are seeking to reform the sector to ensure that it can lend to businesses in the long term, but we have also taken decisive action to stimulate credit in the short term. That is why the Government secured an agreement with the UK’s largest banks to provide £190 billion of new lending to business in 2011. By the third quarter of last year, those banks had loaned more than £157 billion to UK businesses, which is 11% above their implied target. That includes £56 billion of lending to small and medium-sized enterprises—10% higher than at the same point in 2010.

I noted that during the rather long speech of the shadow Business Secretary, he talked about lending but put forward no ideas about how Labour would tackle it, yet we in government have taken action to get the banks lending to businesses and to make sure that there is a supply of creditors to SMEs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

There are some basic questions of fairness that people in Britain feel strongly about, and we have to reinstate that fairness. In 1979, the top pay at Barclays was only 14.5 times that of the average pay. It is now 75 times higher. Did people not want to work at the top of Barclays then? Did they not want to work hard for their bank? I think that they did. The problem is that the top levels of pay have accelerated to a level that no one considers fair. The suggestion that, if we do something about that, people will go elsewhere and that we will be unable to recruit seems strange. The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) spoke of a time when personal tax rates were higher, but people were still prepared to do those jobs here. We cannot go on accepting the mantra that they will go elsewhere—

[Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

They left the country.

[Sheila Gilmore]

They did not go, and the banks did not collapse. They recruited chief executives and board members.

In fact, in 1979, the inequality gap, as measured by the Gini coefficient, was at its lowest in the entire post-war period. Does that matter? I suggest that it does. If I were an employee of Barclays, working as a teller or in a back-room job, my motivation to work hard would go down as I learned about the huge disparities in pay. This is not about jealousy, or about feeling that people should not be able to earn. If we want people to accept, as we have suggested, that we cannot increase public sector pay in the way that we want to, and if we are all in this together, it has to be fair. That is primarily what the motion is about. Those who do not support it will find that, rather than wanting to dig in and be “all in this together”, people will be dissatisfied and demoralised, and our businesses simply will not grow.