Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Peston and Lord Lawson of Blaby

Wednesday 18th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Peston]

My Lords, I am very sympathetic to the amendment and to what has been said by my noble friends. Unlike them, I am much less optimistic about what can be achieved, if anything. First, I will give the personal side. When I was at school, I was indebted, and have been indebted for the rest of my life, to my teachers for the guidance they gave me on the subjects that were taught in school. My love of English literature and my love of mathematics are two very good examples. However, if someone had said “Now we are going to have a class in finance”, I cannot believe that it would have been other than a turn-off. It would not have been what I went to school for.

Times have changed. I agree with that. However, the other thing is that is amazingly difficult to explain to people even the most elementary examples of financial literacy. To give one example, which is one of my bête noire, I come from a family of gamblers. I know that gambling is a mug’s game because to be a successful gambler, there are only two possibilities. Either one is corrupt and has some inside information or one is claiming—with the bookmaker creaming 10% off the top—that one is 10% cleverer than anybody else around, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that. When I have tried to explain that elementary proposition in financial literacy, I have found it impossible to persuade anybody at all. That is my personal experience. It does not mean that we should not try, but it does mean that there is a genuine question mark over what we can achieve. I am not saying that we should not try, but I am pessimistic.

I turn to the technical side of financial literacy. Perhaps noble Lords have read a brilliant speech given by Andrew Harvey of the Bank of England in 2009. It is on the Bank of England website. My strong advice to noble Lords is to look it up under “Speeches” rather than “Publications”. I wasted a good hour knowing that it was there but unable to find it. It is a brilliant analysis of the behaviour of financial intermediaries—which is after all the essence of financial literacy—and it is based on network analysis, which is a rather esoteric part of mathematics. I will read one paragraph from Andrew Harvey’s lecture, which I strongly recommend.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

Andrew Haldane.

[Lord Peston]

Sorry—Andrew Haldane. I am not good on these things. Names are one of my Alzheimer’s problems. Mr Haldane says, in a typically short paragraph of his brilliant lecture:

“This evolution in the topology of the network”—

that is, the network of financial intermediaries—

“meant that sharp discontinuities in the financial system were an accident waiting to happen. The present crisis is the materialisation of that accident”.

Financial literacy means being able to understand those two sentences. I am not a bad mathematician but even I had difficulty with the topology of networks. That is the problem in this area. What you can teach at the level at which the noble Lord, Lord Flight, wants to teach, is very little indeed. As I said, that does not mean that we should not do it, but we should not delude ourselves that we can produce a financially literate population because most people simply do not have the mathematics to understand this kind of work. I cannot believe that anybody could write a non-mathematical explanation of what Andrew Haldane said.

Nothing I have said should stop us from trying—I am not going against the noble Lord, Lord Flight, on this—but financial literacy is not the easiest thing to achieve.