My Lords, I do not mean to be in any way offensive to the noble Lord, but we cannot afford to be naive. We were naive for decades and in that period significant abuse took place. I am not talking just about a failure to make proper credit decisions. If we look at RBS, we can see that it lost money the old-fashioned way. It made very foolish loans and abandoned appropriate credit standards. You could call that incompetence rather than venality. But what of money laundering, LIBOR mis-selling and PPI mis-selling? These were not failures of competence; they were quite deliberate abuses of the customer on an industrial scale, year after year after year. The assumption that all the people engaged in those activities have either changed who they are or have left the industry is, may I suggest to him, naive?
Part of the underlying problem is that so much money is at stake here. For senior people who turn their eyes away from abuse, there are very substantial financial rewards. As we have seen, even when there are some penalties such as clawback, they are only a small proportion of extraordinary rewards. We are in a situation where the risk is high if abuse continues. I understand the noble Lord’s concerns over the reverse burden of proof, and I do not support it lightly, but as my noble friend Lord Sharkey said, we have on the statute book at least 10 or 11 other Acts, frequently supported by Members of this House, which have decided that the reverse burden of proof is necessary because it is the only way for the law to be effective.