Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a different point, if I may say so. I agree that there is a benefit, if we are going for the run-down option, in an orderly run-down. I understand that, and I think that he is right. However, it is a different argument from saying, as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central apparently believes, that the way to deal with the situation is to put more money behind the business idea that landed us in the circumstances that we found last September. In the circumstances that Northern Rock is in now, the Government should be clear that they are not proposing support for another attempt to make the failed model work. But that is what the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central apparently wants the Government to do. It is on exactly that question that the Government are being studiedly vague. May I pick up a specific term used earlier in interventions on the Chancellor? He took some comfort from the proposition that Northern Rock in public ownership, as he calls it—a nationalised industry—would be run on a normal commercial basis, as if that was a term of art capable of independent analysis. The whole point about a commercial market is that commercial players look for new ways of exploiting markets. They look for competitive advantage. Northern Rock thought until last summer that it had found a new model from which it could derive commercial advantage. It was therefore being run on a normal commercial basis. It is just that that normal basis of seeking to exploit a new business model did not work. To attempt to confine the scope of the new corporation by saying simply that it will be run on a normal commercial basis begs all the difficult questions and gives absolutely no comfort to me on behalf of my constituents as taxpayers. So I oppose the Bill not because I deny the benefit of providing a period for orderly management of the company's affairs, but because the Bill fails to take advantage of the opportunity to clarify a series of objectives for new management, which in my view should clearly be the orderly realisation of the assets of Northern Rock. I believe that that is right from the point of view of taxpayers and of avoiding state-subsidised competition in the marketplace. I acknowledge that it will be difficult for those who have been employed in the building of a business model that ultimately did not work in the marketplace, but I believe that those people's futures will be far better secured by re-employing them in a business model that works than by trying to offer them a second round in a business model that did not work.