My Lords, my first thought on seeing this new offence relating to bank failure was to be mildly appalled at something that might possibly impinge on one’s personal life, but I have tried to put that to one side and to look at this clause dispassionately. What concerns me is a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, which relates to causation. That is mentioned several times in this clause, but one of the conditions in subsection (1)(d) of the new clause proposed by Amendment 58 is that,
“the implementation of the decision causes the failure of the group”.
Is it clear that single decisions cause failures of the nature that we are talking about? I ask him to think, in the context of the failures that existed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, whether any one of those, had they occurred today and been dealt with under existing legislation, could have technically satisfied the wording in this offence. Even in the simplest case of failure, which was probably Northern Rock, it was not as simple as one decision or even one group of decisions. There were multiple points of decision which contributed. Certainly, when one gets to something as complicated as the failure of Lehman Brothers, I would be absolutely astonished if anybody could have pointed to one decision causing one failure.