Mark Garnier

With the leave of the House, I wish to address one or two of the points made in the debate. The hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky) is an incredibly valuable contributor to the debate because of his experience back in the days of the 2008 financial crisis. If I remember correctly, that was largely a result of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, which almost compounded the problem by having a tripartite regime that looked after the banking sector at the time. If I remember rightly, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time found it so scary that his eyebrows nearly turned white. One of the surprising things about that crisis was that just 10 years earlier we had seen the Asian banking crisis, which basically laid the groundwork for what subsequently happened in the west. Perhaps we in the west were too arrogant to believe that it could happen to us, yet it sure did. In my role as a member of the Treasury Committee from 2010 to 2016, and on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, I looked at all these issues very extensively. It is incredibly important that we resolve the issue. As it has turned out, the Financial Services Act 2012 and the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013 have worked well in respect of some of this resolution. On the point about LDIs and the financial crisis as a result of the Budget, we dealt with the problem pretty swiftly and pretty brutally. When one of our leaders gets it wrong, we get rid of them fairly quickly. I suggest to the Labour party that if Government Front Benchers get things wrong, it is worth cauterising the problem and moving on. On credit unions and mutuals, we absolutely recognise the point about the mutual sector. We are not asking for demutualisation to be ruled out; we are asking for the prospect of avoiding demutualisation to be part of that very swift process. That is why we will press amendment 2 to a Division. I met the credit unions yesterday, and they are keen that the principle of new clause 3 is voted on, so we will press that as well. Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.