Financial Services Bill

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 14th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, I will call Members to speak in the order listed. Short questions of elucidation after the Minister’s response are discouraged, but any Member wishing to ask such a question must email the clerk. The groupings are binding. A participant who might wish to press an amendment other than the lead amendment in a group to a Division must give notice in debate or by emailing the clerk. Leave should be given to withdraw amendments. When putting the question, I will collect voices in the Chamber only. If a Member taking part remotely wants their voice accounted for if the question is put, they must make that clear when speaking on the group.

Amendment 14

Moved by

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The second problem that I have with the amendment is that it asks for a report from the Treasury on progress made by the Bank of England on offering basic bank accounts. As far as I am aware, the Bank of England does not itself offer any bank accounts. In fact, I believe that it closed the last bank accounts that it offered about five years ago. I was very proud to have a Bank of England bank account, which I acquired when I was a member of court. It had an extremely grand cheque-book and I was very unhappy when the Bank of England closed the account. It did that because it was a relatively small operation, and it simply could not keep up with the online technology that one needs nowadays to make a retail offering. It closed them down and does not have the capacity to do it now, so it would be completely wrong to expect the Bank of England to step back into retail banking, having consciously stepped out of it.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, has withdrawn, as she is speaking in Grand Committee, so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the government amendment in this group. We are seeing regulations catching up with financial innovation. As ever, it seems that the regulator is being forced to chase after advances that are screaming into the future with potentially very disturbing results.

However, I chiefly wish to speak to Amendment 35, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and to offer my support for it, or at least for its principles. As the noble Lord said, we are talking about innovation, but innovation that is actually for the common good—innovation that works for people, and particularly, innovation that works for the most vulnerable in our society. The figures really are deeply shocking: estimates of 1 million unbanked people; 8 million people with debt problems; 9 million people with no access to mainstream credit. One thing that is not adequately recognised is the poverty premium: the fact that not having a bank account or access to mainstream credit means much higher costs for everything from utility bills to borrowing and very well documented impacts on health and wellbeing.

This seems like an apt time to ask the Government whether they have given further consideration to the recommendation from the Select Committee on Financial Exclusion, which reported in March 2017. It called for a Minister responsible for financial exclusion. Is this something that the Government are really going to focus on by means of this Bill? The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, may have concerns about the structure of this, but the intentions of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, are very clear. Are the Government going to take action?