This is one of the most important matters that we will have to decide, not merely to make the banking system safer but to address the cultural problem. Proprietary trading is, as noble Lords will be aware, trading which a bank does entirely on its own behalf. There is no client at all. It is the
furthest from the culture that we expect of banking, which is a culture of prudence and of servicing clients. Here, there is no client and we know from experience that, far from there being a culture of prudence, proprietary trading tends to be of a highly speculative and gambling nature.
It has also, incidentally, been connected with some of the greatest scandals. The LIBOR scandal, for example, was a proprietary trading scandal. Even when there is not a scandal, even when it is perfectly reasonable—I have nothing against speculation as such—in my judgment it is alien to what the banking culture should be. Speculation should be left to the hedge funds. It is a hedge fund activity par excellence and it should not be conducted by banks. That is my view. The view of the commission was slightly different. It was that, while that is probably so, there are practical difficulties and therefore there needs to be a full-scale review a few years hence to see how this is working.
At the moment, of course, there is very little proprietary trading going on in this country. Before the great crash of 2008, the amount of proprietary trading that some banks were doing accounted for more than 30% of their total business; it was as big as that. It has now disappeared, but it will almost certainly come back. Incidentally, when we had this debate in Committee my noble friend Lord Deighton said that there was no need to do anything now because there was no proprietary trading going on. With the greatest respect, he missed the point. We are saying that we should review this a few years hence when there may well be something going on. In fact, there almost certainly will be something going on. We are not legislating just for the here and now, but for the medium term and, so far as we can, for the long term. There will not be another banking Act for a very long time, so it is important that this review is in place.
There is one other thing that the review will be able to do. My good friend Paul Volcker, a very distinguished former chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States, has been largely responsible for introducing what is known as the Volcker rule in the United States, which attempts to ban proprietary trading. Their system of legislation is so appalling that the rule has got encrusted with myriad barnacles which may make it less effective, but, nevertheless, the clear intention was to ban proprietary trading. He is a very wise observer of the banking scene over many years and he understands full well the practical and cultural problems that derive from banks engaging in proprietary trading.
A review a few years hence will be able to take account not merely of what is happening in the banking world in England at the time but will be able to see how the Volcker rule has worked in practical terms in the United States—and, if it has been defective in any way, we can learn from their experience. Therefore, I urge my noble friend, who made a remark yesterday, almost en passant, about proprietary trading when we were talking about the ring-fence, to go further today and to accept the amendment which we, as a commission, feel is right. He may want to change the wording in some way or other—I suspect that the period we set was a bit too soon; it might be sensible to have it a little further out—but I will leave that to his excellent
judgment. The important thing is that the essence of this must be accepted by the Government. I beg to move.