Royal Bank of Scotland (FSA Report)

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

My hon. Friend is right to recognise that the quality of supervision needs to be higher than it was in the pre-crisis days. The need for much more engagement by better qualified banking supervisors is a priority not just for the FSA but for the Bank of England, which will be introducing measures for precisely that purpose.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

The Minister said that the FSA had failed to challenge the RBS management sufficiently over its decisions. That is a masterful understatement. In October 2007 the FSA had precisely four and a half staff in RBS: half a manager and four team members. It was possibly the biggest bank in the world, it was systemically important, and its asset base was bigger than the GDP of the United Kingdom. Will the Minister guarantee that, irrespective of the future shape of banking and regulation, the RBS’s successors—the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority—will always have enough of the right people in such systemically important banks, so that we never encounter such a situation again?

[Mr Hoban]

That is an important question. I referred earlier to the pressure under which Tony Blair put the FSA to adopt a proportionate regulatory regime. One of the examples put to the then Prime Minister about the light-touch quality of the regime was the fact that there were only six people supervising HSBC, and even fewer have been supervising RBS. I understand that there has been almost a fourfold increase in the number of RBS supervisors, and I think that that is a much better approach. We must ensure that there is intrusive, intensive supervision, and that requires not just more resources, but a higher quality of resources.