Clause 184
Banking Bill
5:15 pm
Peter Viggers (Gosport, Conservative)
I concur with colleagues who feel that we need rather more detail in the clause. It mentions a penalty. Are we talking about a fine or could there be a penalty other than a financial fine? We need to know the basis of the assessment.
We Members of Parliament spend a lot of time talking about penalties in criminal and civil cases. I had to discover from a constituency case that, for example, Customs and Excise operates way outside any statutory scale and it is open to it to impose such a penalty for offences as it thinks fit. There needs to be some sort of calibration of the penalty that can be imposed.
Moving ahead to the appeal procedure under clause 188, which we are not discussing at the moment, I see that there can be an appeal against a warning notice of a requirement to pay a penalty. That wording sounds a little cumbersome to me, but at this point I simply refer to clause 184 and ask for a degree of clarity on the amount of final penalty that the Government have in mind.