Baroness Noakes (Con)

I thank noble Lords for taking part in this short debate. There were three parts. First, Section 5 of the 2009 Act needs to mention the bank recapitalisation power, which is what the amendment does. The Minister is going to write on that. We moved on to issues with the content and timing of the code. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, that we all understand that the Bank needs powers to act as quickly as possible. Nobody is trying seriously to harm that. Taking what the noble Lord said to its logical conclusion, the statute would say just that the Bank of England can do whatever necessary when it comes to situations of bank failure—full stop. We would not have the many pages of the 2009 Act and all the complicated, mind-blowing arrangements that exist, holding companies and everything like that. We would not need that because we could just say that it could do everything. It is overstating the case to say that trying to write codes of practice would hold the Bank up in doing its duty when things go wrong. What the Minister said on content is a helpful move forward from where we were. We may want to explore that a bit further on Report. However, timing is a concern, as we will not have further clarity by the time we reach Report. The only useful thing he has said is that they expect to reissue the code of practice prior to this Bill coming into force. I suggest that it would be pretty negligent not to update it before bringing the Bill into force.