Clause 5
Banking Bill
9:00 am
Ian Pearson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform; Dudley South, Labour)
It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Chair for this sitting, Mr. Illsley. I spoke at some length on the proposed amendments to clauses 5 and 6 on Tuesday afternoon, and I do not intend to do so today.
I should like to say two things in response to the hon. Gentleman, the first of which is on his point about the FSA and the need to explain the situation. The FSA is looking at the guidance on threshold conditions, not the conditions themselves, and plans to consult on it in December. However, as I made clear earlier, I can confirm that adequate resources and management suitability are key conditions for assessment of the trigger.
There are always decisions about what to put in primary legislation and what is more naturally secondary legislation or required in codes of practice. Those decisions are fairly straightforward in many instances, but in others they are matters of judgment, with fine distinctions. We always have debates about those issues.
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s general support for the Bill and I note his comments on the code. As he says, we are consulting on it, starting today, and also consulting on the secondary legislation. We have been working closely with the expert liaison group and others to ensure that we get the details of the secondary legislation right. I do not think that there are any differences on intention or principle other than on who exercises the trigger. There is genuine willingness on both sides of the Committee to have legislation and a code of practice that does the job that we all want it to do. With those brief comments, I hope that we can move on.