Channel Tunnel
Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Popat
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, for many people the major disruption of the Channel Tunnel is that, despite having been able to use it for 10 years now, no one can take a direct service to either Brussels or Amsterdam or anywhere outside France. I do not know whether this is because of competition restrictions on the other side of the channel or difficulties with passport control, but can we please get this fixed ?
Lord Popat
That is for the French Government to comment on. However, I will certainly take it to the department and will write to the noble Lord about what more the French could do to make travelling from Paris easier.
Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Popat(10 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Popat
My Lords, on 1 November RBS committed to a new direction that will lead it to being a boost to the UK economy, rather than a burden. It will be dealing decisively with the problems from the past by separating out the good and the bad and putting the bad loans in an internal bad bank. RBS will now focus on its core British business, supporting British families and companies. It will sell off more of its overseas operations and go on shrinking its investment bank so it has more capital to support lending to the British economy. RBS is committed to becoming the number one bank for small and medium-sized enterprises, as judged by customers, measured by the newly created survey to be run by the Federation of Small Businesses. On growing SME lending, RBS continues to be the number one bank for SMEs.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, one of the key problems at the moment in the British economy is not about lending but quite the opposite—businesses are sitting on cash mountains, particularly large corporations and even medium-sized and some small businesses. We need now to liberate that cash so it is invested and drives this economy forward. Is not the good news economically at the moment the exact trigger for those businesses to do just that?
Lord Popat
I agree with my noble friend. In fact, we are returning to consumer and business confidence. The figures this morning from the OECD show that our growth forecast has gone up from 0.6% to 1.4% for 2013 and 2.4% for 2014. My noble friend is quite correct that a large number of SMEs are holding cash in their banks. A lot of them are also risk averse, or were until recently, and hence are not borrowing that much money from the banks.