Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

My Lords, I remember discussing this at length during the passage of the previous Financial Services Bill. At that time, I commented that one could often detect whether a proposition made any sense by proposing a negative outcome. If we suppose that the duty is to make the markets work badly, that does not make any sense at all. Therefore, it seems to me that the strategic objective is entirely redundant and serves no useful purpose. Indeed, the idea of changing what were previously operational objectives into prime objectives places competition at that prime level and achieves the objectives which the Government themselves have argued are necessary. For some reason, this issue was never satisfactorily explained previously and has not been satisfactorily explained now. We should apply Occam’s razor and take it out.