UK Parliament / Open data

Financial Services Bill

My Lords, I start by taking up the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Barnett. At one level it is highly amusing that we are wasting all our time today and on Monday debating the first few clauses of a Bill that is likely to collapse during the wash-up. However, there are, for example, 100 members of staff currently employed by the FSA who have been told that their employment will be transferred on 1 April to the new financial information body. They have been told this by the Treasury. They are now in considerable confusion as to what will happen to them. I took this, when I heard about it, to mean that the Government had already decided that they would call an election before 1 April; the Bill would be dealt with in the wash-up; the clauses dealing with this matter would be allowed to go through in the wash-up; and the staff’s employment would, under TUPE, be transferred on 1 April. However, that is by no means clear, which is one reason why I support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Barnett. It would be extremely helpful at this stage if we knew which parts of the Bill the Conservative Party will allow to go through wash-up and which parts it will kill. If we knew that, we would not waste our time debating the parts that will be killed, but we could at least attempt to improve those bits of the Bill which might survive. Moving on to the first group of amendments, it seems that the answer to the question posed by the noble Baroness about who is in charge is blatantly clear. The Chancellor is in charge. Whether the Bill is enacted in this form or with the noble Baroness’s amendments, that is the fact. There is no real ambiguity about who calls the shots when things get difficult. My other problem with these amendments is that they seem to stem from what is, I think, a misunderstanding of the role of the Council for Financial Stability. It is not an executive body. It is a co-ordinating body. The Bank of England is not an arm of government in the same way that a department of state is. It is established under its own legislation. Although the Chancellor calls the shots, the Governor of the Bank of England has a statutory degree of independence, as does the head of the FSA. The principle established in the Bill codifies what already exists—namely that the three bodies which, between them, are responsible for financial stability meet under the chairmanship of the Chancellor and co-ordinate action. They all do what they do. The council does not have a staff of its own that will scurry around implementing things. The Government go away and implement those decisions that relate to them and the head of the FSA does the same for the FSA. Therefore, it seems to me that the phraseology in Clause 1(3) about reviewing and co-ordinating accurately reflects what the council is supposed to do.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
718 c248-9 
Session
2009-10
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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