Banking Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a telling point. The Minister may wish to look into it. I think that the relationship between rating agencies, auditors, banks and accountants has become a little too cosy. There are a few too many long lunches, pats on the back, and matey shooting parties after grouse on large estates in Yorkshire. I am making a serious point: we need to examine these relationships. If there has been a failure in a duty of professionalism, legal action may well need to be taken against the responsible individuals. This is a banking Bill—a banking Bill about the regulation of the banking sector—so let me return to that. I make a plea to the Minister, and to all my colleagues, that we examine, collectively, the practices of some of our high street banks at this moment in time. It is simply not acceptable for a person who exceeds his or her overdraft limit at a major high street bank by £1 to be immediately slapped by a charge of £15 a day. If it takes three or four days for the bank to send a letter to such people alerting them to the fact that they are overdrawn by £1, the charge may have increased to £60, £75 or even £90 before that person realises that they have a £1 overdraft. Such rates of interest are absolutely usurious. Anyone who sold them door to door would be arrested. They would be locked up and, rightly, the key would be thrown away. The practices of some of our high street retail banks are shocking and shameful, and now that they are being underpinned by the taxpayers, those taxpayers—our constituents—will have even less patience with the outrageous and, quite frankly, vicious charges levelled at some of the most vulnerable and least well-off members of society. Let me make a couple of other points. Banks need to strengthen their balance sheets. They want to obtain cash from wherever they can obtain it, and there is every chance that they will target good and successful businesses in pursuit of that money by raising interest rates to a level that not even a successful business in the good times could possibly hope to meet. So they will sacrifice the long-term viability of that business—that client—in return for a short-term gain to their balance sheets. I hope that the Minister is aware that that may happen, and will follow developments very closely. I am sorry that we have come to this stage, but it is absolutely right for the Government to be guaranteeing savers' deposits. Let us be in no doubt, however, that this is a massive transfer of wealth from some of the least well-off in society, and I shall now briefly explain why that is the case. We all have many constituents—some Members have more than others—who earn at or just above the minimum wage. They live day to day and week to week. They do not have savings—or, at least, significant savings—or mortgages, yet they will underpin this bail-out through an inevitable increase in their taxes over the next two or three years. Therefore, we need to be mindful—as I know my hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor is—that some people at the very bottom of the income scale will get very little out of this bail-out, and if we get into Government at the next general election, we must find a way of helping them. In the meantime, I hope the Government of the day are also mindful of their plight, and that they find a way of helping them. Having expressed those few thoughts, I will sit down, but I must first have just one passing swipe, not at the Government, but at the British Bankers Association—I believe that is what it calls itself. The brief it sent round in advance of this debate was pathetic. It should hang its head in shame; there was not a note of humility anywhere to be found in it. Yes, we need the banks in this country, but they have a lot of ground to make up, because no one trusts them anymore, and as we all know from our time in this place, trust needs to be earned. We must at present have all hands to the pump, therefore, and we will have the forensic examination of this Government's record and policies in the next few months.