Financial Services Bill

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Peston, that analyses were done by, for example, the Bank of England, on the way in which leverage was building up in the system. That went completely unnoticed, and I will be developing that point at a later stage. Some of the sources of what we had to cope with came from a shock from outside the UK, but the way that we dealt with it impacted hugely as a result of the way that arrangements had been set up by the current Prime Minister from 1997 onwards. That is the fundamental position of my party. My noble friends Lord Hodgson, Lord Stewartby, Lord Higgins, Lord Trenchard, Lord Forsyth, Lord Northbrook and Lord Howard approached this in much the same way. We cannot see what is in this new Council for Financial Stability. It does not appear to do anything to solve anything from the past. It does not represent an advance. It leaves many questions completely unanswered, as I said in my opening remarks. It is well known that these arrangements are not the policy of my party and we do not wish to see them. We will debate this later when we reach the end of Clause 1 in the way that we always do—we debate the content of the clause and then whether or not it should stand part of the Bill; so we will return to these issues later. For now, I shall not pursue this issue further.