My Lords, I am genuinely grateful to the Minister for her response, which was very helpful and contained information about which I was not aware—I thank her for that. I will read Hansard in great detail. In her letter, can she explain a little more about those 18 contracts that will be covered and the retained powers? I would find that very interesting, although I am sure I can also google it.
I will now sum up. I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Bowles and Lady Kramer, for their contributions. Returning to the statements by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I am sure it is seen as a great success that we have this $600 trillion market in stuff that exists in the future, which is hugely complex and can crash the global economy. Some people will have benefited hugely from it; I have no doubt that some of those people may be in this Room. The point is that there is someone paying at the other end of that profit, and often it is the people at the very end of the chain who are trying to buy food in supermarkets or heat their homes. If a bubble in that market is definitely benefiting some—even maybe benefiting the Government, if they are receiving revenues from it—it comes at a cost, so we should be very mindful of the need to regulate that market. There is evidence after evidence of these bubbles forming because, quite frankly, the incentives to make cheap money are huge. Compared with the real economy, where you actually have to do things, build things, sell things and employ people, the desire to make money fast is overwhelming, and I do not want the UK to become the home of ever more exotic derivatives that allow us to make money the quick and easy way. Let us make banking and the financial markets boring again by getting them back to basics: using money to further society’s aims. If we cannot do that individually, we should do it collectively. I do not want to get on my soapbox, but the fact that we are exiting Europe makes that more difficult, so even more scrutiny needs to be applied now that we are setting our own rules.
I am grateful for the responses. I will end by saying that I had the pleasure of meeting a gentleman who worked in a bank that was more than 500 years old. I asked him about its ESG policies, and he listed them. They started with, “We will make no profit at all from soft commodities”, then went on to the usual checklist about arms and whatever else. I asked him where that came from, and he said, “Oh, we can’t remember”. Because it was such an old-fashioned concept—that we should take a moral position that we will not engage in profiteering from soft commodities—it sort of lapsed into the history of time.
Banking was moral once. I am not saying it is immoral now, but it is incredibly complicated. The incentives to make money in ever more novel ways are always there. Even the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, alluded to the fact that systemic risks exist. They have existed in my lifetime and I am sure they will come again.
I am glad that we are here to do this scrutiny and very glad of the Minister’s offer to write. I hope that we will revisit some of these questions, and I will end on Amendment 41. I have personal experience of how energy companies are loath to disclose how much of their profits rest on trading. If that is the case, the markets should care about it and disclosure is the most obvious step to address it. With that, I beg leave to withdraw.