Financial Services

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Wednesday 6th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend speaks with great expertise. He has worked in and represented with distinction the City of London over the years, and more than anyone he recognises the importance of it re-establishing its prestige. Part of doing that and of sending a signal to the current generation working in financial services is to say clearly that the misdeeds of the past need to be put right. Where people or small businesses up and down the country have suffered detriment, we should not turn a blind eye. We should be rigorous in holding people to account, and acknowledging the harm done to businesses that have suffered from past mis-selling, and when we do that we should look—as in this case—to recover the costs of such mis-selling from the perpetrators. The Chancellor has set out that principle and I expect the banks to follow it in the months and years ahead.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I welcome the statement and particularly the fact that the fines will be paid by the banks and not the taxpayer. I also welcome the fact that the British Bankers Association will no longer have anything to do with LIBOR. However, this is not just about who calculates the LIBOR rate, but how it is calculated. Will the Minister update the House and say how we will have transparency and the confidence to know that rates submitted by the banks are those at which they can borrow money, rather than the acts of fiction, fixes and fiddles that we saw over many years with many banks?