Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

To follow up on that point, rather than having a gun in the locker, some of these powers should be seen as akin to a nuclear deterrent. As parliamentary commission members will remember from doing the media rounds after the publication of the report, one of the big questions was whether Fred Goodwin would have gone to prison if we had had these powers in place. The answer to that is that RBS would not have gone bust in the first place. The deterrent element of these powers, rather than the enforcement element, is what is important.