It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who mentioned me several times in her speech. In the broadest sense, I agree entirely with what the Government are doing, but I have one or two reservations, to which she alluded.
It is worth looking back to why the bank levy was brought in and to what it was a response. It was, of course, a response to the bank bonus tax introduced by the previous Government, which was brought in, in turn, to try to get some money back for taxpayers from when the banks were bailed out. I think that it is the right thing to do. Banks should help to pay back the taxpayer, but the bonus tax was never going to work. The banks were always going to get around it one way or another. Many suggestions were put out by newspapers and banks, but the one that summed up the banks’ approach best for me was a Matt cartoon in The Daily Telegraph. A trader was pictured sitting in front of his boss in a bank; the boss turned around and said, “I’m afraid you are not going to get a bonus this year, but we are going to buy your tie off you for three million quid.” That was the sort of approach that the banks were going to take.
It was therefore right for the Government to bring in a levy that could not be got around. Of course that was the right thing to do, and the intention was to raise enough money from the levy to make up the shortfall that would follow from getting rid of the bonus tax, which was around £2.1 billion to £2.2 billion. The levy was an unavoidable tax. It started out at nine basis points, rising on nine occasions to 25 basis points. That resulted from the reduction of balance sheets and from the slight change in the shape of the deposits profile—moving away from the deposits profile that would attract the levy.
It is worth bearing in mind what Douglas Flint said when he came before the Treasury Select Committee in January 2011. I asked him for his view about the future of HSBC in the UK and whether it would keep its domicile. The hon. Member for Wirral South mentioned Standard Chartered and HSBC in her speech. Douglas Flint said that the domicile was reviewed once every three years and that 2011 would be the year in which that happened. When he came before us again in January 2012 and I asked him what he was going to do, he said he was going to defer it.
It became apparent that the shareholders at HSBC, one of the best and biggest banks in the world—and, indeed, one of the most stable—were very upset about paying quite a hefty lefty, which only got bigger, on their
international earnings. The same applied to Standard Chartered, which had very little earnings within the UK. None the less, in responding to shareholder pressure—the shareholders were asking, of course, for an opportunity to get more return for their money—those chief executives were saying, “Don’t worry; we will ride this out and the bank levy will eventually disappear at some point.”
After five years of that, the pressure from shareholders was becoming very intense. If Standard Chartered and HSBC had left the country, the bank levy would have had to rise from 24 basis points to more like 35 basis points in order to maintain the £2 billion or so in revenue. Paying 50 basis points would be a very significant taxation on deposit levels within banks. Inevitably, then, if Standard Chartered and HSBC had left, the whole bank levy would have spun out of control and eventually wound itself into a knot that would have been completely unsustainable. That is why the Government had to do something about it.
Before I move on, it is worth looking at what the banks were getting as a result of paying the levy. The first thing—in justifying the levy to shareholders this is an important point—is that the banks were paying back the taxpayer who had bailed them out with a lot of money. The taxpayer required some sort of levy to get some of the revenue back. The second important point is that the bank levy could almost be seen as a type of insurance premium charged against the banks for having what is known as “the implicit guarantee”—the guarantee that, should the banks fall over as two of them did in 2007-08, the Government would stand behind them and pick them up.
However, the provisions of the Financial Sector (Banking Reform) Act 2013 were introduced in order to try to get to the stage where the banks would no longer need to be supported in the event of a collapse—that there would be an elegant collapse; there would be bail-in bonds and ring-fences around the important parts of the banks, so that never again would the Government step behind the banks. The banks would be allowed to collapse without causing contagion through the banking system. That is an incredibly important change.
The argument about the bank levy being an insurance premium would eventually diminish to nothing with the finalisation of the fairly expensive Banking Reform Act in 2019. As for paying money back to the taxpayer, we are in the process of doing so by means of the sales of RBS, Lloyds, Northern Rock Asset Management, and the various other assets that were bought. At some point, we shall be able to draw up a final P&L to establish whether we—the UK taxpayers who bailed those banks out—have got our money back.
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The bank levy was becoming obsolete in some respects, and even more difficult to justify to shareholders of the big international banks that do not have to pay it because they have moved their domiciles offshore. It is worth bearing in mind that HSBC moved from 1 Queen’s Road Central in Hong Kong to the United Kingdom only 15 or 20 years ago, so this is not a difficult thing for it to do. Spiritually, it does not have a long history in the UK, and it can easily move back.
It is right for the Government to get rid of the bank levy, and I am very pleased to note that it will be reduced by 2020, but it had to be replaced by something,
and, again, we must ask what the banks are getting for their money. The levy can be justified on the basis that we provide, as a society and as a country, a very benign and stable economy, which the banks can use to their advantage to make money.
It is not entirely unreasonable for institutions that are trading in the purest form of capital, which is cash, to be able to take advantage of that economy and make money out of it. They have a social function to perform: they have to distribute money from where it is accumulated to where it is needed, which is a very democratic process. They also have to do complicated things such as modifying maturity on deposits to loans, which is a very difficult business. None the less, we provide one of the best regulatory environments in the world. It is expensive, admittedly, but it is very good. We have a sound economy, we are getting back on our feet, and, relative to the rest of world, we can be very proud of what we have achieved. It is justifiable for the banks to pay something as a contribution to that. However, I have reservations, and I therefore ask the Minister to carry out an ongoing review of what is happening with the new bank tax, starting with the banks themselves.
It is right that the banks that will be affected are predominantly the larger ones. People talk about challenger banks. The British Bankers’ Association has about 250 members. There are a lot of banks in the UK, and 47 of them can be considered to be challenger banks. Some are as small as Kingdom bank, which has a balance sheet of just £50 million; others, such as Metro bank, are doing very well.
Most of those banks will not be affected because their profit does not exceed £25 million, but in some instances, to which the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) alluded, non-bank profits could be brought into this tax regime. However, I do not think it is a bad thing if some non-bank profits are moved into separate divisions within a bank. If there is a wealth manager function within the bank, for example, is it such a bad thing for that element to be separated from the bank in what effectively amounts to a protective ring-fencing, so one side can be protected from the other? I do not think there is anything too bad about that, as long as the bank is not destabilised. Of course, the regulator will have a look at that.
The vast majority of banks will not be affected. Challenger banks will be able to try and build up their profits, and when at some point those profits exceed £25 million, they will start paying the surcharge. It will be worth seeing how many banks pay it in the future, but it should be borne in mind that their legal structure enables those banks to raise capital through equity transactions. They can sell extra shares, which is how they can build their capital so they can meet the challenge of building market share against the bigger banks.
The mutuals, however, are a different animal. There seems to be some confusion over quite how many of them are being affected, but it is certainly a small number. I thought it was only two, but it could be as many as five. Mutuals cannot go to an equity market to raise capital—I do not agree with the argument that this is taking money out of the lending market, although I suppose that is probably a fact—but they are still better off than they otherwise would have been in 2010 with corporation tax at that level.
The biggest problem for the mutual companies is that, in trying to build their assets, they have to build their equity base, which can be done only through retained profits. We therefore must be cautious about taxing them a little more and slowing the rate at which they can build retained profits. Having said that, the biggest building society, Nationwide, has created a new hybrid bond that can bring cash into its balance sheet, proving that there are alternatives.
I am genuinely happy to support clauses 16 and 17 for all the reasons I have discussed, but I say to the Minister that there may be unintended consequences. While I do not necessarily think we need an immediate review, given that this is going to be coming in over a number of years and changes will take a bit of time, the Treasury should have a look at the effect particularly on mutuals and the smaller challenger banks that possibly have non-banking earnings and are making profits of around the £25 million mark, to see whether this has a negative effect on them.