Speeches by Glen.

“Just to quickly abbreviate another set of questions I was going to ask you, why would the consumer duty not be satisfactory on that? That is what the FCA would say, would they not, in terms of resisting a fair banking Act?”

“Ms Williams or Mr McAteer, do you want to say something on this area?”

“Sorry to intervene, but I want to get to the heart of this. You accept the principle that banks will not always be able to serve everyone, but you recognise that they have an obligation. It is about the mechanism and the obligation they have to refer to others. That is the space where intervention could happen.”

“If it does not work, then fine, but if it does work, let us keep it. That is basically what I think. Could I turn to you, Professor? Can you help us to understand, when banks fail vulnerable people, because they cannot match their product to the needs of a vulnerable person, what you think should happen? We do see a pa…”

“I personally found that very helpful. Thank you.”

“Could I follow up on the no-interest loan scheme? We have worked on this previously. I have always thought this could make a meaningful contribution, if scaled up. Mr Bland was not so sure. I wonder where you think we are at with this. What is the big decision point that would determine whether it is scalable or not, o…”

“Could I move to Ms Williams? I wanted to address this issue that we had last week with Matt Bland of ABCUL. The Government have committed to this £30 million credit union transformation fund. I wonder what you think about that. The Financial Inclusion Commission wants to get to £3 billion by 2030 in terms of the afford…”

“It is conceivable that an affordability test on one transaction would not have sight of others. Therefore, the overall indebtedness of the individual would not be dealt with.”

“Can I just follow up on that last point? Does the Government intervention on buy now, pay later account for multiple purchases across multiple platforms to assess affordability? If you have done buy now, pay later five times and you want to take a sixth, how does it account for the aggregate debt?”

“I am a member of the Financial Inclusion Commission, as Ms Williams knows, and I should declare that in the context of what we are discussing today.”

“I welcome the Government’s apology for the maladministration and the Minister’s clarity today, but many Salisbury WASPI women will be very disappointed by the decision. Could the Secretary of State say a little more about what options he looked at to compensate the poorest, most vulnerable of the WASPI women? I recogni…”

“Just building on that, there are quite a lot of cash-like instruments, money market funds, different sorts of gilts, and so on. This uncertainty is surely a big concern for your members. Would you have expected this to have been resolved before the announcement was made?”

“Mr Bland, you said that the number of credit unions—which I recognise from my exposure to this a few years ago—has reduced considerably. I think we have 240 credit unions with less than £10 million in assets. There is mention of a sum of £30 million for transformation. Is there not a danger that we will get into a simi…”

“That is the precursor, is it not, for the Committee and for the wider benefit? In essence, is that what we are talking about looking at again?”

“Mr Bland, during our previous interactions when I was Economic Secretary from 2018 to 2022, we did a number of things. We doubled the common bond from £2 million to £3 million. We allowed car insurance and hire purchase to be products that credit unions could offer. We also did the prize-linked saving schemes. Over the…”

“I mean do it better, obviously.”

“On the direction of travel, very few months passed in my four and a half years as an Economic Secretary when I did not see a credit union fail; then there was some consolidation. How would you reassure the public that investment in this space is not going to be wasted and not be effective in improving the resilience of…”

“Essentially, what you are talking about is a series of interventions to set up a series of shared entities to presumably support different subsets of the credit union sector which provide financial services alongside commercial organisations. What would be the justification for spending taxpayers’ money to do so when, …”

“Just for the record, I am not against credit unions, as I hope you recall. I am trying to draw out how we can do this better.”

“You were in favour of it a years ago.”