Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell) should calm down. Today we debate all stages of a Bill that will give the Government, for the next year, unprecedented powers to take into public ownership any bank or building society. We are also to debate the particular application of the Bill to Northern Rock. Having listened to the Chancellor for the last half hour, one could forget that for five months he and the Prime Minister had done everything possible to avoid the course of action that the Chancellor is recommending this evening. Even after his half-hour speech, we still do not know the simplest things about the Bill. For a start, we do not know how much we are buying the bank for. We do not know what we are buying in terms of its assets and liabilities, nor how long we are buying it for. What do the Government plan to do with it once it has been bought? I know that the Prime Minister has a long record of doling out public money with no regard as to how it is spent, but even by his standards this is a huge blank cheque. Let us go through the questions in turn. First, what are the Government going to pay for Northern Rock? We are told that that will be decided after we have bought it, which is certainly an unusual approach to buying something. The Chancellor hopes—I stress ““hopes””—that the shares will be valued as all but worthless. However, as he knows full well, the hedge funds will fight tooth and nail through the courts for £4 a share, which would leave the taxpayer with a bill just shy of £2 billion. He can give the House absolutely no assurance that he will be successful in persuading either an independent valuer or the courts to agree with his valuation. When the House passed the British Leyland Act 1975, the cost to the taxpayer was limited in the Bill to £265 million. There are precedents in nationalisation Bills for putting a limit on taxpayer exposure in terms of the amount of money that the taxpayer will pay for initial purchase of the company.