My Lords, I support Amendments 21 and 51 as strongly as I can. We all know that the vast majority of people in the City of London and other financial centres are decent people who try to do good rather than bad, but the system of
which they are part has been largely stripped of its ethical underpinning. Although you cannot inculcate morality by statute law, you can at least provide support for the forces of good and truth in dealing.
These two amendments are the very minimum required. I wonder whether the wording of Amendment 51, which refers to “rules of conduct”, is ideal. As a lawyer, whenever I see the word “rules”, I slightly draw back, because lawyers spend their time avoiding rules on behalf of their clients.
I would have hoped, and still hope, that if either or both these amendments were incorporated into the Bill, they would be construed in a wide way. There is no shadow of doubt but that too many people arrive in positions of responsibility without regard to these rules. As the most reverend Primate said, you can have a junior dealer who can cause devastating damage to a bank or other firm. So I hope that the Government accept these amendments or agree to come back at Third Reading with something comparable, bearing in mind the astonishing fact that the vast majority of our business schools have no ethical component in their curriculum at all. I do not think that 10% of them do anything in terms of ethics. If anyone says to me that it is a waste of time and a lot of hot air, they need only glance back at where we have come from. As other noble Lords have said, the degree of cynicism manifest in the policies and actions of so many financial institutions is stunning.
I hope that, if these amendments are brought into the Bill, they are construed widely by those who have to implement them. I am particularly happy that Amendment 51 would require any breach of standards of conduct to be reported to the relevant authority, because that is a real deterrent. People would be anxious about that. This proposal must be the absolute rock-bottom minimum to provide some underpinning for the future of financial services.