My Lords, I have listened to what the Minister has said. On the second of his two points, I think that he is very close to the position that I and other noble Lords who have spoken are in concerning the IFRS accounts and their defects. He is very much closer than he is on the first one, and he is very close to what I was trying to say. He said that the Government are going to see whether they can get an improvement. He referred to CRD IV, which goes some of the way but is not entirely satisfactory. The only way that we will get accounts in a form that is satisfactory for the regulators and the supervisory requirements is if they ask for that. He is absolutely right that they can do that now. In practice, they could have done it before the 2008 crash, but they did not. That is the problem. Those of us who support the amendments are saying: once bitten, twice shy. It could have been done before; it can be done now. But it was not done before. Therefore there should be a statutory duty, which would make it more likely that it will be done. How can that be objectionable?
On the first issue the principle is the same: once bitten, twice shy. The idea that this is simply a bit of box-ticking is an insult to the intelligence of this House. As we say in the amendment, the meetings should take place more than once a year—and they will be nothing to do with box-ticking. They will be meetings of the kind that the supervisor and the regulator find most useful. Those people will use their discretion; there is no box to be ticked at all. That idea is—if I may say so, with great respect to my noble friend the Minister—a total absurdity.
It is perfectly true that under the code of practice and so on, such meetings could take place anyway. But that was also the case before: not only could such meetings have taken place, but the Banking Act 1987, which was then in force—that part was not repealed—
encouraged them to do so. However, although meetings did take place to begin with, towards the end they did not happen. That is why it makes sense to make it a statutory duty for those meetings to happen. They will not take the form of box-ticking; they will take the form that the regulators and the supervisors find most useful. We leave that to their discretion, but we do not wish to leave to their discretion—this is, in effect, the Government’s position—whether the meetings take place at all. We may wish to discuss this further, but for the present I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.