The governor of the Bank of England has warned the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, against a radical watering-down of City banking rules because it would risk repeating the mistakes that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Andrew Bailey said that while some changes to the rules could be helpful, wholesale reforms to unleash risk-taking in the City of London in the name of economic growth would be counterproductive.
“There isn’t a trade-off between financial stability and growth. We’ve had that experience,” he told MPs on the Treasury select committee.
Reeves last week used her annual Mansion House dinner to announce sweeping changes to banking industry rules, telling City bosses she believed that in too many cases regulation was a “boot on the neck” of business.
Bailey refused to back the chancellor’s analogy when pressed by the Treasury committee chair, Meg Hillier, saying: “I do not use those terms, let me say that … It is not a term I use.”
The chancellor’s measures are part of the government’s wider drive to kickstart economic growth as Labour’s cornerstone mission after years of flatlining progress on living standards. Although the UK outpaced the rest of the G7 in the first quarter, the economy shrank in April and May, while unemployment and inflation is rising as businesses grapple with tax rises and uncertainty from Donald Trump’s trade war.
In a pointed intervention a week after sharing a platform with Reeves at the Mansion House dinner, the governor said veterans of the 2008 financial crisis recognised there were clear dangers linked to slashing City red tape.
“Sadly I can understand when I hear people say the financial crisis is now way in the past, we’ve got past that, that’s all solved, that’s out of the way, move on … Yes, of course the world moves on,” Bailey said. “But that was the experience of losing financial stability and we had a very serious recession in this country after that.”
However, he said regulations should not be set in stone, highlighting how the government could tweak City rules after Brexit to make Britain’s banking industry regulations more reflective of the UK than the EU.
“There are areas where we should clearly look at it. And we’ll look at it, we’re very open to that. We’ve announced a whole range of things we’re doing. That’s a good thing. But we can’t compromise on basic financial stability, that would be my overall message.”
Bailey’s comments come after several leading figures involved in Britain’s post-2008 drive to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis warned Labour against unpicking bank ringfencing – a key measure to separate high street banking from riskier investment banking that was introduced after the collapse.
Sir John Vickers, the architect of the UK’s ringfencing rules, told the Guardian a wholesale retreat would be a “very bad idea”.
Against a backdrop of intensive lobbying from leading banks to water down the regulation, Bailey said such a change would have little benefit for lenders and put UK households at heightened risk.
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“It [ringfencing] has benefits in terms of UK customers and UK consumers; businesses and households. I think that is a helpful feature of it. I don’t think it hinders banks fundamentally in terms of their business models,” Bailey added.
“Again, at the margins, I am sure there are things that can be improved and we will work constructively to go through that process. It has established itself as part of the system and to me it would not be sensible to take it away at this point.”
The Treasury has committed to reforming the rules after a review led by the City minister, Emma Reynolds. It has said it is “committed to upholding the ringfencing regime to protect financial stability and safeguard depositors. However, the government also intends to take forward meaningful reforms to the regime to support its growth agenda.”
Separately, Bailey cast doubt on whether the central bank would introduce a long-mooted digital currency.
Having worked on the project for several years, the Bank’s governor said if a drive by commercial banks to adopt digital payment technologies was successful that he would need “a lot of convincing” to push through the Bank’s own plan.
“That’s a sensible place to do it because that’s where most of our money is [with commercial banks]. My view is, if that’s a success I question why we need to introduce a new form of money,” he added.
