Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

My hon. Friend is right in the sense that we have not heard anything from the Chancellor about the general state of Northern Rock's mortgage book beyond his bland assessment, repeated month after month, that it is in a good state. That is not what the credit rating agencies are saying. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said that we do not know how much we will be paying for the various City fees that have racked up while we have been waiting for the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to make a decision. We know that Mr. Sandler is going to be paid more than £1 million a year, but we do not know what the total bill for the advisers will be. I think that the Chancellor said, in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, that he would publish the fees at some point—I hope that he did; I shall have to check Hansard tomorrow. I hope that that is the case, and that he does not just publish the fees for Goldman Sachs; hon. Members may not realise it, but we are paying the banking fees of Olivant, Virgin and Northern Rock. Once they became preferred bidders, Northern Rock agreed to pay their advisory fees, and that is how we get to the £100 million figure on the front page of some of the newspapers. Let us be clear: the consequence of nationalisation is that the risk of every Northern Rock loan defaulted on, of every Northern Rock mortgage that cannot be repaid, of the pension deficit and of those City fees will now be borne by the taxpayer.