Tyrie: Vickers commission is too secretive
MAJOR reforms to the UK banking system should not be debated in secret, according to senior Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who used an industry conference to call for more openness in the Vickers commission process yesterday.
Tyrie, who chairs the influential Treasury Select Committee, said that the changes under consideration are too important to be discussed behind closed doors.
He told City A.M.: “The banks must tell us publicly if they don’t like Vickers and not try engage in a private debate with the commission. This has got to be in public. It’s public money, taxpayers’ money, at stake.”
Recently, a split emerged between the UK’s biggest banks over Vickers’ proposal for a ringfence around their retail divisions, with the chiefs of Barclays and RBS against the idea and senior figures at HSBC and Lloyds in favour.
But their positions only came to light during public hearings held by the parliamentary committee that Tyrie chairs.
Tyrie added that no one should pre-empt Vickers’ final conclusions. Regarding the ringfence policy, he said: “If it turns out to be impractical then we’ll have to try something else – capital and liquidity controls or better resolution regimes, or go the other direction and go for full separation [of retail and wholesale banking].”
Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, who was speaking in his role as chairman of the British Bankers Association (BBA), warned against viewing increasingly high capital reserves as the answer, however.
“I do have a concern that some regulators seem to believe that ever more capital is the solution to every regulatory problem,” he said. “Carried too far, this thinking would have profoundly negative consequences. And not just for the banks.”