Financial Services Bill

My Lords, I was very interested to hear the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, about the way forward from here to the wash-up. It would certainly be helpful if noble Lords in all parts of the House turned their minds to their potential attitude toward different parts of the Bill if it comes to a wash-up, which looks very likely. Thirty years ago, I was responsible for handling the Banking Bill, as it was, which became the Banking Act 1979. It went to wash-up, and lack of experience on my part definitely meant that I was not as clear-cut as I should have been on what I was trying to achieve in the discussion of the wash-up arrangements. We ended up leaving the situation with banks that could call themselves banks, and small banks which could only call themselves banks if they were based abroad. The ones in the UK were licensed deposit takers. It was because all this was done at great speed and with great complexity that we ended up with a system which did not work. We need to bear in mind the lessons from previous occasions of this kind. I turn to the roles and functions of different parties in the work of regulation and supervision. The Bill as drafted by the Government is extremely difficult to understand because it is full of statements about what people are expected to do and who should have responsibility for what. When I first looked through the Bill, I asked myself: could I readily determine how the behaviour of the parties concerned, if the Bill was enacted, would differ from their behaviour until now? I found that question difficult to answer. I tried to draw a grid to see who was losing functions and who was gaining them as a result of the Bill. I confess that the proposals are extremely difficult to understand, not least because of concepts which have been developing on this subject. I look at phrases such as "macroprudential stability", whatever that may be. You might get up in the morning and say, "How am I going to do some macroprudential stability today? Would it be better to wait until after lunch?".