Lord Livermore (Lab)

My noble friend sums up quite nicely the balance between rules and administration. We are maintaining many of the rules that were put in place, as I have tried to make clear this evening. We are maintaining the architecture that was put in place after the global financial crisis, but the way in which those rules were administered was overly burdensome and probably disproportionate, placed too much of a burden on the sector and stifled the growth there that we want to see. As I have said, the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction, and the balance of regulation has gone too far towards regulating for risk and not enough for also regulating for growth. As I have said before, no other globally competitive financial services hub imposes such bureaucracy on its businesses, so neither should we. My noble friend asks what we are doing about it. What we are doing about it underpins the entirety of these reforms. We are seeking to recalibrate and rebalance the approach to risk so that it is more proportionate and that, in the right places, consumers and industry can take informed risks so that we create the space for the innovation and growth in the sector that I think we all want to see.