Banking Bill

Perhaps I should have stuck to my guns and gone through the Bill. We are not just proposing that one change: we are proposing many changes. However, the point I was making was that the basic architecture of the Bank of England having responsibility for monetary policy and an overall responsibility for financial stability, and the FSA regulating and supervising each individual institution, is right. We consulted on that point, and the vast majority of people said that that basic architecture was right. Of course, the FSA has to learn the lessons of what happened with Northern Rock and other institutions. As I said earlier, of course improvements need to be made to the supervisory regime, but no one is arguing that we should go back to the past, when the Bank of England regulated some aspects of the banking system but not others and we had eight or nine different regulators for everything else.