In following the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso), I apologise that transit issues meant that I, too, missed the start of the debate. I will take up only a little time in the Chamber today, but, following the comments made by the hon. Gentleman and by the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), it is important to make the point that it is not just those who have served the House well on the Parliamentary Commission for Banking Standards who have concerns about such issues and can see the difference between the Government’s offer and the amendments tabled by Opposition Front Benchers and by the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie).
We talk about the electrified ring fence and, essentially, the Government are offering us a Fisher-Price electrified ring fence—a VTech model. They have looked up ring fence in the index of the Argos catalogue and gone for the one in the toy pages. There is not much point the Government’s saying they have taken everything into account, that this is the best model and that it will give everybody reliable assurances. Frankly, that is like trying to pretend that a tyre is flat only at the bottom and that this is just a minor stylistic difference about perception. The difference is about substance and reliability.
I encourage the Minister to listen to what right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House have said, and particularly to those who have had the best insight into these issues through the parliamentary commission and who have changed and modified their views, like the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross. They have been able to give it more consideration than someone such as me, who comes to the question on a reflex reaction of full separation.
I recognise that the ring fence is the only show in town, but it must be reliable and meaningful. The Government’s proposed procedure in amendment 6 could take longer than the life of a Parliament to have an effect. There will be not just the preliminary decisions but the Treasury consents required for those decisions, and tribunals after the warnings and the decisions, then variations and consultation between the regulators—the whole thing will go on.
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If we are legislating about something we have reason to fear might arise in the life of the next Parliament, is it credible that we expect those who sit in that Parliament
to say, “Thank God for the legislation the previous Parliament passed. They equipped us to deal with this situation. They learned the lessons of LIBOR and everything else and made sure the regulator had powers to deal with egregious breaches and circumstances that nobody would have thought of when they were legislating”? We cannot legislate for every contingency, but we have learned from LIBOR and so on that we must legislate for all sorts of inconceivable excesses that might arise, as well as for things that might be felt to be excesses in the eyes of this House and of a wise Committee such as the Treasury Committee.
We should not deny regulators the back-up equipment that would be needed in such a situation. As a Member from Northern Ireland, I will not get into “guns in the locker” and so on, as other hon. Members have. I will talk about tools in the toolkit and equipment at base that might be needed in an extreme situation, and clearly the regulators need such equipment.
We as a Parliament also need to learn the lessons of the past. We made false assumptions that things were going swimmingly in the City and everything was okay, which is why the Opposition’s proposals for a periodic review are so important. People do not trust Parliament to be alert enough, which is why we need to legislate for ourselves and for the regulators—and, most importantly, to regulate for the public interest.