My Lords, I did not speak at Second Reading because I could not stay for the wind-ups, but listened to most of that debate. I should like to press my noble friend on his logic. He says that we cannot have some body to police or check up on the regulator. I am very surprised that my noble friend Lord Blackwell, with whom I am normally absolutely on the same square on most issues, says that we must trust the regulator. There was a reason we got into this mess and, by the way, we still ought to have a proper inquiry into what the regulator was doing and how the crisis happened in the first place. The very last thing I feel like doing is trusting the regulator.
We have also seen the regulators going off to work for the banks at, no doubt very appropriately, very high salaries to help them with their compliance and operation of regulation. Let us face it, I am not sure where I stand on the notion that we should trust the regulator on this matter. Like the noble Lord, I was prepared to go along with ring-fencing but could not see how it could work. But it certainly is not going to work if you have very clever people in the banks and at the regulator, but no one is actually breathing down the regulator’s neck. That seems to be the lesson that we can learn with absolute clarity from the previous experience.
I have to say that my noble friend’s logic was, “We can’t possibly have the regulator being subject to second-guessing all the time. How are they going to be able to carry out the agreed policy?”. As has repeatedly been said in a number of speeches, this is an experiment because it is part of a compromise to try to get the banks reasonably on board and to proceed on the basis of consensus.
In my seven years—perhaps it was nine years—working in an investment bank, I learnt that investment bankers are extremely adept at getting between the wallpaper and the wall. If they can find a way to get around something, they will. That is their job and how they
make money and resources. The notion that if we have ring-fencing there will not be lots of clever people finding very good schemes to get around the intention of it and that the regulator will stand up to them, especially if we are in a period of prosperity, flies in the face of the experience that we have had.
It is essential to have someone independent of the regulator looking at this relationship and seeing if it is working. They should report to Parliament, with Parliament ready to enforce separation if it is required. It is by putting their feet to the fire in this way that we can be sure that they realise that it is in their interests to make this ring-fence procedure work. Without that, it will not work and we will be back to where we were before you can say “renewed prosperity”.
My noble friend uncharacteristically showed a lack of logic in what he was saying. If he wants the House to commit itself to this policy, he needs to address this basic question of who will guard the guardians.