My Lords, I thank all the noble Lords who have made very powerful contributions and thoughtful points.
I will not detain your Lordships with lots of history; you know it much better than I do. However, to remind the Committee how this came about, I will repeat something that has already been said. The Financial Services Act 2012 gave rise to the Oversight Committee, largely in response to recommendations made in the report Accountability and the Bank of England from the Treasury Select Committee in the other place. That report recommended that the court should be reformed into a board, with powers to conduct ex-post reviews of the performance of the Bank; that board members should be authorised to see all the papers submitted to the MPC and FPC; and that the board should be responsible for reviewing the processes of the Bank’s policy committees.
The Treasury Select Committee argued that the new board should be called the Supervisory Board of the Bank of England but, despite this name, the structure that was proposed was in fact a unitary board. As has been said, the Financial Services Act 2012 took steps to implement these recommendations, by creating a set of statutory oversight functions. However, instead of conferring powers on the court itself, the powers were conferred upon a new statutory Oversight Committee, made up exclusively of the non-executive directors.