Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)

The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, asked why I allowed my amendment to be grouped in this way. I was simply trying to expedite matters for us and I thought we did not need another whole group, which would get the Minister up and down again. I agree with the other amendments and everything that has been said on this group. They deal with issues around conflicts and so on, and transparency is one of the best weapons we have that presumably will be allowed or in scope. My amendment is one of those that do not read as I originally wrote it, because again we came into scope issues. I could not get the exact amendment that I wanted, so this was the best that I could do. Obviously, it is a companion to the amendments in the first group, which were saying that the majority of us want to limit to a threshold equal to MREL. If you therefore want to resolve banks that are a little bigger, you would have to shift MREL. I am not going to cry over that; I will cheer. That may be an improper tactic but we do not have any other tactics to try to focus the PRA on the damage being done to the growth of smaller banks by putting MREL where it was not intended to be. We are out of line internationally and we do not really have any good justification for that. If there is a division between those banks that can be resolved and those that cannot, I still think that it goes there and the Bank will therefore have to give its view as to why. Perhaps it wants an extension in some way, so that it can get at bigger banks. What do we get back from that? That is the thought process that lies behind my amendment. I support all these amendments. If they are knocked into a format that is suitable for Report, they would be very good additions to the Bill.