Financial Services Bill

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard]

As other noble Lords have said, all three amendments are well intentioned. I also welcome the Government’s intention to introduce a new objective for economic growth and employment. However, it is a pity that we are not contemplating the introduction of a requirement to have regard to international competitiveness. If you have regard to the international competitiveness of the marketplace, that will certainly serve the Government’s declared objective to support economic growth and employment.

I do not understand why it is believed that the maintenance of international competitiveness is synonymous with the discredited system of light-touch regulation. We should not abandon at this stage any attempt to reintroduce into the Bill, in more places than at present, at least a requirement—if not an objective, which is what ideally I would like to see—always to have regard to the maintenance of the competitiveness of the marketplace, because that is what drives growth, creates employment and has made London what it is today.

I understand that the FSA’s report on the failure of RBS suggests that the FSA’s need to have regard to international competitiveness was one reason for regulatory failure, but I humbly submit that I doubt that. I believe that you can always have regard to competitiveness while at the same time protecting the consumer and ensuring the stability of the marketplace.

On the three amendments, I am afraid that I am unable to support Amendment 35 in the name of my noble friend Lady Kramer because it sounds very much like the command economy. It would give too much of a planning role to the Financial Policy Committee, and I suggest that it would be very difficult to give that committee on the one hand an objective to achieve a stable and sustainable supply of finance, and on the other a duty to remove or reduce systemic risks that include unsustainable levels of leveraged debt or credit growth. To give that body responsibility both to maintain sustainable credit and to prevent unsustainable credit at the same time would mean that it had to decide exactly how much was going to be lent to every business up and down the land. I submit that this command economy-type interventionist role would be inappropriate, and certainly would not lead to maintaining the competitiveness of the marketplace.

As for the other two amendments, I have great sympathy with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, who treats the growth objective as being equal with the stability objective. Although I am happy to support my noble friend’s objective, which subordinates the growth objective to the stability objective, I ask the Minister to explain in what circumstances he thinks the growth objective would have to be ignored.