Financial Services Bill

I will come on to the number of people in a second because I am not sure that those in the relationship know quite how fully engaged in it they are. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester will remember the Public Bill Committee evidence session in which he asked probing questions of Andrew Whittaker, the general counsel for the Financial Services Authority, and John Footman, who gave evidence on behalf of the Bank of England. It was clear that there was a disagreement about responsibility. The Minister had suggested that this was some sort of endeavour in which everyone shared full responsibility for the body, but Mr. Whittaker suggested that the FSA had a secondary role to play in delivering financial stability, which was not quite the same thing that the Minister said. John Footman of the Bank of England suggested that the prime responsibility rested with the Chancellor because he was accountable to Parliament. We have a confused situation, in that the Government suggest that this is a shared enterprise in which everyone has responsibility, but once we get below the surface and probe the three parties of the new body, we find that the only person who seems to believe in the principle of equality of responsibility is the Minister, and the Bank of England and the FSA believe that they have a different role. That is disappointing, because we would have hoped that one outcome of this process, given the previous lack of leadership, would be clear lines of responsibility. We have tried to get more clarity from the Government at various times throughout the passage of the Bill about who will be responsible for what. We now have a further opportunity to add clarity to the Bill, but if the Minister feels unable to agree with our proposals, he could accept amendment 3, which would strike out clause 1 and send the clear signal that we do not think that this structure will be fit for purpose.