Dunfermline Building Society Compensation Scheme, Resolution Fund and Third Party Compensation Order 2009

I start with the Amendments to Law (Resolution of Dunfermline Building Society) (No. 2) Order 2009. Well, this looks like a fair old cock-up, doesn’t it? I heard the Minister’s remarks about technical changes and technical mistakes, but if my advisers in a commercial transaction presented me with this and said I had to go back to whoever was signing it all off, I would be incandescent. What happened? What was going on? Who was acting in the Bank of England? Was it acting for itself? Were lawyers involved? These seem to be very basic things that you check. If there were outside lawyers, what was the firm? What were they paid? I hope that the bill has not been paid. If they were from inside, I hope that a few people have been sacked. If outside lawyers were involved, what was the firm? What was it paid? I hope that the bill has not been paid. If it happened inside, I hope that a few people have been sacked. These are simple basic things, and for the Minister—although it is obviously not his fault—to have to come here and produce pages and pages of numbers of loans is deeply embarrassing and does not meet the standard of professionalism that we expect from the Bank of England. Can the Minister please answer those questions? Taxpayers are not getting value for money when such obvious mistakes are being made. I thought that I heard him say something along the lines that it was discovered that borrowers on the commercial loan book were eligible claimants under Financial Services Compensation Scheme rules. That mystified me. Can the Minister explain more? I do not understand how borrowers can make claims. Perhaps I am being stupid. I turn to the second order. Perhaps I may ask one or two more general questions about what happened here and where we are. It has become clear that there is a poisonous pile of debt resulting from poor-quality loan decisions on commercial property by Dunfermline. It was clearly way out of its depth. There was horrific exposure to very dangerous sorts of property. For example, a large site in Bournemouth was not income-producing at all. Frankly, no experienced commercial lender should have been involved to anything like that extent—certainly not amateurs playing in a market that they did not understand, like the people in the Dunfermline Building Society. What independent property valuations have been done? When were the last valuations of the properties securing these large loans? If there has not been a valuation recently—and we are in a depressed market, so it is easy to get the valuers to do a check valuation at low cost—will the Minister undertake that there will be up-to-date valuations of the properties so that we can see how far under water the loans are? I have some scepticism about how much time and energy it will be worth investing in the valuation of any compensation payable, given what I believe to be the serious negative equity in which the loans are involved—rather as I felt about Northern Rock. But that is a separate case; I am making a specific request that the Government come clean about the current value of the properties on which these loans are secured. I am sorry; I should have declared an interest. The Dunfermline Building Society was a tenant of a property I manage on behalf of a pension fund. I am waiting for the application to assign to the Nationwide, but it has not come through yet.