Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

I beg to move amendment No. 12A, in page 5, line 36, at end insert—"'(1A) No order under subsection (1) shall be made in respect of the property, rights and liabilities of a building society.'." The amendment continues the theme of the previous amendment to which I spoke. The Bill has been presented to the House as an emergency measure to deal with a special situation—the nationalisation of the Northern Rock bank. For clarity, Mrs. Heal, I advise the House that later we will also vote against the proposition that clause 11 should stand part of the Bill, but with amendment No. 12A our aim is to remove references to building societies from the legislation. It may be that there is a very good case for making some changes to the regime governing building societies. We have already had a discussion about that this evening. There may be a case for applying a regime along the lines of clause 6 in future to building societies, but there is no case to be made for including provisions relating to building societies in a Bill whose purpose is to nationalise a bank, which, by definition, is not a building society. Therefore, we seek in the amendment to leave intact all the provisions of clause 6 as they relate to banks, such as the possibility of transferring assets, liabilities, properties and rights from a bank to a company owned or controlled by the Bank of England or the Treasury in order to facilitate the partial nationalisation of a bank, which is a power that the Government say that they need. We seek to introduce into subsection (1)(a) the additional words in amendment 12A to ensure that the powers in clause 6 cannot be applied to a building society. If the Bill is emergency legislation, it does not need to apply to a building society. There is no immediate and pressing need to have such a provision applying to a building society. We cannot allow the Government to include in a sort of omnibus, portfolio approach any power that they think they might need in a supposed emergency Bill to deal with a specific situation. We have reached clause 6 in the space of an hour. It is already apparent to the House that no proper scrutiny of the provisions in the Bill is possible. The timetable means that it has not been possible for Ministers properly to consider the amendments tabled by the Opposition—to sleep on them, to consult widely on them and perhaps to decide that some of them have merit. So we get a blanket, defensive blocking mechanism, quite understandably, to amendments that Ministers have seen only a couple of hours ago. This is not the way we can agree to proceed to deal with provisions that are not explicitly needed for the immediate purpose in hand—the nationalisation of Northern Rock. If the Minister wants the provisions relating to building societies, she should put them in a Bill that will go through the House in the normal way, with proper scrutiny, so that we can debate with her their purpose and she can explain what she needs them for, and so that we can bring to bear the views and opinions of experts and interested parties outside the House and consider them properly. The provisions are not needed in this Bill tonight, so I urge her to agree that building societies should be excluded from the scope of clause 6.