Financial Services Bill

My Lords, Amendment 14 amends Clause 2(4). I remind noble Lords that Clause 2 concerns the Council for Financial Stability. Under subsection (4), the council must publish minutes of its quarterly meetings. The Bill is silent on the timeframe in which minutes are to be published. I find the lack of a reference to a timeframe very odd. When the Government set up the Monetary Policy Committee in the Bank of England Act 1998, a clear timetable was set out. Why is this Bill silent? The draft terms of reference say that the minutes of the Council for Financial Stability should be published within one month. I have already remarked in Committee that the statement issued by the Treasury under Clause 1(5), which is how the terms of reference come into being, says whatever the Treasury wants it to say from time to time. The Treasury could change its mind before issuing the terms of reference after Royal Assent, or indeed at any subsequent time. As with the Bank of England Act, this should be in the Bill. That just leaves the time period that is appropriate. The Bank of England Act says that MPC minutes should be published within six weeks. Even when that Act was being passed, the practice was to do better than that. For a long time now, the Bank has routinely published the MPC’s minutes 14 days after the meeting. That gives financial markets certainty about when information will be available and is sufficiently close to the actual decision to be useful to the markets. If the minutes of the Council for Financial Stability are to have any importance in the financial world, there has to be both certainty on timing and a timeframe which produces information to the markets as rapidly as possible. My amendment suggests that the Council for Financial Stability should stick with the timetable that the Bank of England now achieves with ease for the Monetary Policy Committee—that is, 14 days. I do not believe that the minutes of the Council for Financial Stability are any more complex than those of the MPC or that this timeframe will be particularly difficult. In addition, the MPC has nine members among whom minutes must be agreed while the Council for Financial Stability will have only three. The task of agreeing the minutes of the council will therefore be simpler and much less time-consuming. I beg to move.