My Lords, this debate began with the clear statement that we should abide by Committee-stage rules. I am sure that noble Lords will be as surprised as I am at the definition of Committee-stage rules in this debate. I thought we were debating a Second Reading, but forgive me if I misunderstood. I, like my noble friend Lord Eatwell, very much agree with the Government on wanting to introduce Wheatley. That review was excellent and well deserved our support. What I am worried about is the way that the Government have decided to implement it.
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It seems a shambolic way of introducing a new Bill from a wrong Bill by way of a huge number of amendments. Today we have started with this large group of amendments. When I started to consider this debate, I looked at Amendment 70 on the definition of benchmark. I thought I would simply look up the definition of benchmark. So I got Chambers Dictionary and was told that it is a surveyor’s mark cut on a rock, indicating a point of reference. That was not an adequate definition so I looked at Google, which I know the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, constantly looks at. Google gave me a huge list of definitions. I then read the amendment further, like my noble friend Lord Eatwell, and found that the number of definitions of benchmark is huge and that the Government have now added many more.
So, to put it mildly, whereas I started off thinking that Amendment 70 was a simple new amendment, I soon found that it was central to the whole question of the LIBOR scandal—how you define a benchmark and how you define it in this Bill. I was pleased to hear
the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayter for on assiduity. She has done a tremendous job and I think the House should congratulate her. But I am still unclear how this new Bill, by way of a huge number of amendments, will have got it right.
I am not a lawyer but one thing that comes out loud and clear is that, whatever the lawyers advising the Government have said is the correct way to put it in this Bill, the lawyers will not have finished with it when we have finished with this Bill. The definition of benchmark will go on for a long time, I fear, and lawyers on both sides will be earning a lot of money on the definition of benchmark and other words in this new Bill.
I will not repeat all the questions that my noble friend Lord Eatwell asked but they need proper answers. I have worried from the beginning about how we ever got into this position. As has been said, we are discussing a scandal that did not just start with Barclays Bank; it ran across banks around the world. It is an international matter, not a little matter here. With this new Bill, done by way of amendments, I wonder how, given the interest in the setting of interest rates as that applies to the Bank of England, to the Treasury, to the Financial Services Authority and to the authority that was supposed to be regulating it, the BBA, none of them knew anything whatever about this manipulation. I find that astonishing.
With the amendments in this Bill, we now have criminal sanctions that will be imposed. I ask the noble Lord whether those criminal sanctions can be made retrospective because somebody surely is guilty here of knowing about it and turning a blind eye. We have recently been discussing all sorts of serious questions about the BBC, but somebody here must have known. The bankers’ association, the BBA, was supposed to be regulating this. Somebody in the BBA either knew, or did not know and was totally incompetent. On top of that, there is the incompetence in the Bank of England. It has about to given a huge responsibility in this Bill under the new initials of FCA and all the other new bodies that it is going to be responsible for. This is the Bank of England that did not know a thing about the manipulation of interest rates. No wonder it is having trouble finding a new governor of the Bank of England. It seems to me that the only person who will know a lot about this will be the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon. I hate to suggest it because I like him too much, but I hope he is not thinking of applying. Clearly he is about the only person who knows anything about it.