Finance (No. 2) Bill

Stephen McPartland Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 18th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend remember the City Minister, Ed Balls, saying in 2006 that nothing could endanger the light-touch regulation of the banking system?

[Stephen Kerr]

I thank my hon. Friend for that useful intervention because I absolutely do remember that. The reason why those words might linger in mind longer is that they came from someone holding an office of state. Cabinet members at the time were positively encouraging those whom they considered their friends in the City to become increasingly reckless, as was the First Minister of Scotland, as I have mentioned.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge]

I consider the hon. Gentleman to be a friend because we work together in Suffolk as MPs; we are always happy to do that. I will be coming to the issue of the crash and the way in which the banks went back to the 1930s, as he puts it, because I experienced that myself.

[Stephen McPartland]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the total tax take from banks now is 6% higher than it was in the year before the financial crash?

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent intervention and provides the rebuttal for me. The key point is that more tax is being raised now than before the crash.

My point is that were we to apply now the test of the impact on the public revenue under Labour’s very own review as proposed in new clause 3, we could only come to one conclusion, which is that all the taxes we have put in place on the banking sector—not just the bank levy—have been raising significantly more revenue. The rising revenue has contributed to paying off the deficit and supporting UK public services. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), is shaking his head. I am happy for him to intervene and tell me that we are not raising more tax from the banks. He was very generous in giving way to me, but it appears that he is not going to intervene.

Subsection (2)(b) of new clause 3 states that the review that Labour would introduce of the bank levy would look at

“reflecting risks to the financial system and the wider UK economy arising from the banking sector”.

I always find it amusing to see a Labour amendment—particularly from this Labour party—talking about risks to the financial system; indeed, I think the shadow Chancellor himself has referred to Labour as a risk to the financial system. One wonders whether, in its own review, Labour will be modelling what the impact of a run on the pound—let alone a run on the banks—would be on the banking system. I certainly think it would be most profound.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North said we are going back in time, but of course we have to go back, because the bank levy was born out of what happened in 2008. The bank levy came from the crash, which has had very many wider impacts, but particularly on this aspect of our tax system.

Let us remember the real bank levy—the real cost to the public. The cost of the bail-out of the banks was £850 billion. That was the figure the National Audit Office published in 2009 while there was still a Labour Government. That consisted of all kinds of costs. There was £107 million for City advisers—that’s right, a Labour Government spent over £100 million on City advisers. There was £76 billion to buy shares in RBS and Lloyds. There was £250 billion to guarantee wholesale borrowing to strengthen liquidity. There were many more hundreds of billions of such costs, including hundreds of billions for the Bank of England to insure itself in providing liquidity. People forget that. When we talk about the cost of the bail-out, we are not talking just about buying shares in the banks; this huge amount of subsequent activity that took place ultimately has to be accounted for, and it is borne by the whole of our economy and all our taxpayers.