Finance (No. 3) Bill

Thank you, Mr Gray. I appreciate very much the passion with which my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) expresses his concern about BSF, which is a sentiment that I share, but I take the Chair's point, and the bank levy is exactly what I want to speak to. I am concerned, because it offers an opportunity to deal with the challenges to our economy, and therefore the Bill should be amended by amendment 9. I return to the case that I am trying to make about the high-cost credit market in the UK and its impact. It is precisely because the market has not been subject to any regulation, which could be introduced under the amendment, that we have seen a massive explosion in payday lending—a quadrupling of the industry in the past 18 months alone. Dollar Financial, which Members may know better as The Money Shop, has already stated that the lack of regulation here brought it to the UK. The company had one store in the country in 1992, 273 by 2009, and it has announced plans for a further 800 this year alone as a result of that lack of regulation. The question of adequacy, which the amendment raises, includes how those companies act—certainly, that is how I interpret it—and the opportunity that the levy and its review could provide for dealing with the impact of their actions on consumers in the UK. By using the review, we could ask whether the levy might be applied in such a way as to deter consumer detriment.