DOCSLIB.ORG

This Is Para

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
This Is Para CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 606-vii HOUSE OF COMMONS HOUSE OF LORDS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION ON BANKING STANDARDS BANKING STANDARDS WEDNESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2012 MARTIN TAYLOR Evidence heard in Public Questions 355 - 448 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Joint Committee on Wednesday 31 October 2012 Members present: Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chair) The Lord Bishop of Durham Mark Garnier Baroness Kramer Lord Lawson of Blaby Mr Andrew Love Mr Pat McFadden John Thurso Lord Turnbull Examination of Witness Witness: Martin Taylor, Chairman of Syngenta and former member of the Independent Commission on Banking, gave evidence. Q355 Chair: What you lack in numbers behind you is made up for in quality; I note that the head of the Treasury Bill team is sitting behind you. I hope that no notes get passed. Thank you very much for coming. You have thought about these issues very deeply—as deeply as almost anybody—and you did so on the basis of very extensive personal experience in a major bank. May I begin by asking you what contribution, if any, you think that structural reform—whether a ring fence or full separation—can make to improving standards in banking, which is at the heart of this Commission’s work? Martin Taylor: I will start with the ring fence, since it forms the basis of our recommendations and also the Bill. Chair: One or two Members are asking if you could speak up. Martin Taylor: Yes, of course. There are two principal points about the ring fence. One of them is that it would help in resolution, in a crisis, allowing the authorities to protect the ring-fenced bank and let the rest go, theoretically at least. I do not think that would help with banking standards, but the second point certainly would, which is that the ring fence is intended to undermine the extension of the implicit Government guarantee to the whole banking organisation—that is, to allow the investment bank, as has been the case in the past, to raise money on the faith and credit, effectively, of the retail organisation. It is our belief that installing the ring fence will prevent this from happening. If that is successful—and I believe it would be—you will prevent the investment bank from doing certain kinds of business that it was able to do in the pre-crisis years. I regard that as a big contribution to standards. 2 Q356 Chair: How will that alter the way banks sell products to retail customers? Martin Taylor: The way that banks sell products to retail customers is an issue that the Vickers Commission did not really consider, except in trying to make sure that there was enough competition in the market. It is a very troublesome issue. We have got ourselves in the wrong place, in the way banks sell products to retail customers. A lot of people in the industry recognise that. I was thinking this morning, coming in, how difficult it is for retail customers—including, by the way, what the industry calls high-net-worth retail customers— to get genuinely disinterested advice. It is astonishing really, because one would suppose that there is an enormous demand for it. The purchases of major investment products, insurance products and mortgages—the big things that people do in their financial lives—are enormously important to them. They are not products that should be pushed, and certainly not products that should be sold against the interests of the customer. Q357 Chair: Are they going to be better protected if we have a ring fence? In particular, do you set any store by the view that traditional banking, as it is often described, was infected by investment banking at a certain point, thereby changing the culture of retail banks for the worse by moving towards a more transaction-based approach? Martin Taylor: I have just been reading the paper that Alan Budd submitted to this Commission describing the ecosystem as it was at the end of the 1980s, and I certainly recognise the world that he describes; the cultures of the old clearing banks and investment banks were indeed very different. Has there been contamination? Q358 Chair: That is more or less what he is saying. Martin Taylor: I am not sure that he is. He is saying that these things are very different, and this was 20 years ago. He says, “Things have changed since then.” One of the big changes that have taken place in the past 10 years is that these organisations are now—or were until very recently, in the case of Barclays—all run by investment bankers. That is a big change; it was not the case in the 1980s or 1990s. I suppose that was done because boards had so much risk on the table in the investment bank, which they imperfectly understood, that they put someone in place who they knew could manage it, or at least understand what was going on. The pushing of the sales culture in retail banks has obviously been growing. I do not know whether you can blame the investment bank co-location for that. It seems to me to have at least as much to do with the free-in-credit current account. Because the banks are, under the present interest rate circumstances, forced to make a loss on their bread-and-butter products, they get the money back somewhere else. Q359 Chair: We are not asking whether it was the only factor—we are already confident that there were many factors—but we are asking whether it made a contribution. Martin Taylor: Maybe. Q360 Chair: If so, and if you put a ring fence in, is it going to contribute to dealing with the problem? Martin Taylor: If you put a ring fence in, or if you did a complete split, you would have a board that was responsible for the retail operations, and one could suppose that there might be an attempt to build a distinctive retail culture, which has been rather obliterated in some places. 3 Q361 Chair: Banks appear to have somewhat grudgingly accepted that a ring fence is going to be imposed. Do you think the right incentives are in place for them to ensure that this works in the long term? Do you think there is a case for putting on the statute book, on a contingency basis, at least implicit scope for full separation, and putting that in the hands of the regulators, perhaps with some political checks and oversight before it could be triggered, to ensure that banks do not engage in a war of attrition? Martin Taylor: For me, there are a number of disadvantages in having a full split rather than a ring fence. The main reason why I would support a full split was if I thought a ring fence was unworkable. I do not think that—I think a ring fence is a superior solution—but if a ring fence were put in place and proved to be unworkable because of attrition, as you call it, there would be a case for going further, but I do not start from that. Distinguished people who have given evidence to this Commission have pointed out to you that a ring fence could be permeable. It is certainly true that there might be an awful lot of people out there who have an interest in making a ring fence permeable. Equally, if you give the regulators the powers that, as I understand it, the draft Bill foresees that they should have, and if you give the board of the ring-fenced body the duties that it is foreseen they should have, I think you have some pretty strong defences in place. Fences need keeping up; whether it is a garden fence or a ring fence, they need work. Q362 Chair: Are you confident that we have this fence at the right height? Martin Taylor: A lot of thought went into the Commission’s1 work. I was looking at the book this morning. There is a list of detailed stipulations on page 73 of the final report, which I draw to the Commission’s2 attention. They are, in particular, intended to prevent the investment bank—the non-ring-fenced organisation—from improperly leveraging itself on the back of the ring-fenced bank’s assets. Let us remember, too, of course, that we are not recommending a ring-fenced bank in isolation. The whole world is moving towards much tighter capital standards, thank goodness, so they will also be in place—both inside and outside the fence. Q363 The Lord Bishop of Durham: It was not in the remit of the independent Commission—the Vickers Commission—to look at banking standards or conduct, but if it had been in your remit, do you think that it would have altered any of your conclusions, particularly around the ring fence, but also more generally? Martin Taylor: We should have wanted at least another year if we had looked at banking standards. Q364 The Lord Bishop of Durham: That does not encourage us.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • University of Surrey Discussion Papers in Economics By
    råáp=== = = ======råáîÉêëáíó=çÑ=pìêêÉó Discussion Papers in Economics THE DISSENT VOTING BEHAVIOUR OF BANK OF ENGLAND MPC MEMBERS By Christopher Spencer (University of Surrey) DP 03/06 Department of Economics University of Surrey Guildford Surrey GU2 7XH, UK Telephone +44 (0)1483 689380 Facsimile +44 (0)1483 689548 Web www.econ.surrey.ac.uk ISSN: 1749-5075 The Dissent Voting Behaviour of Bank of England MPC Members∗ Christopher Spencer† Department of Economics, University of Surrey Abstract I examine the propensity of Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (BoEMPC) members to cast dissenting votes. In particular, I compare the type and frequency of dissenting votes cast by so- called insiders (members of the committee chosen from within the ranks of bank staff)andoutsiders (committee members chosen from outside the ranks of bank staff). Significant differences in the dissent voting behaviour associated with these groups is evidenced. Outsiders are significantly more likely to dissent than insiders; however, whereas outsiders tend to dissent on the side of monetary ease, insiders do so on the side of monetary tightness. I also seek to rationalise why such differences might arise, and in particular, why BoEMPC members might be incentivised to dissent. Amongst other factors, the impact of career backgrounds on dissent voting is examined. Estimates from logit analysis suggest that the effect of career backgrounds is negligible. Keywords: Monetary Policy Committee, insiders, outsiders, dissent voting, career backgrounds, ap- pointment procedures. Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Relationship to the Literature 2 3 Rationalising Dissent Amongst Insiders and Outsiders - Some Priors 3 3.1CareerIncentives........................................... 4 3.2CareerBackgrounds........................................
    [Show full text]
  • The Political Economy of Tax Policy
    IFS The Political Economy of Tax Policy James Alt Ian Preston Luke Sibieta Prepared for the Report of a Commission on Reforming the Tax System for the 21st Century, Chaired by Sir James Mirrlees www.ifs.org.uk/mirrleesreview The Institute for Fiscal Studies Full Report to be published by Oxford University Press The Political Economy of Tax Policy1 Final Draft for Mirrlees Review 12 March 2008 Do not cite or quote without the authors’ permission Professor James Alt, Harvard University Professor Ian Preston, University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies Luke Sibieta, Institute for Fiscal Studies 1 The authors thank Stuart Adam, Lucy Barnes, Tim Besley, Ian Brimicombe, Alan Budd, Judith Freedman, Rachel Griffith, James Hines, Paul Johnson, Alison Post, James Poterba, Christopher Sanger, Guido Tabellini, Christopher Wales and conference participants in Cambridge for their helpful comments and suggestions 1 Executive Summary This chapter reviews major changes in British tax-setting institutions in the last quarter century and highlights four key points about the politics of tax policy, which are summarised below. The chapter also makes policy recommendations, such as for improving scrutiny and parliamentary accountability; these are also summarised below. A “passive” movement to the right The chapter analyses whether changes in voter preferences and strategic party positioning could explain declines in statutory rates of income tax. What we discover is that electoral support has moved to the right, though voters seem to have followed rather than led the changing content of party manifestos. Voters have always favoured redistribution, particularly from those with the highest incomes to those with the lowest incomes.
    [Show full text]
  • The Global Financial Crisis – Why Didn't Anybody Notice?
    8 THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS – WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY NOTICE? The Global Financial Crisis – Why Didn’t Anybody Notice? On 17 June 2009, a group of leading academics, economics journalists, politicians, civil servants, and other practitioners met at the British Academy for a round-table discussion of the current financial crisis. The question under discussion in this British Academy Forum had been framed by Her Majesty The Queen on a visit to the London School of Economics in November 2008, when she had asked: if these things were so large, how come everyone missed them? A purpose of the Forum was to provide the basis of an ‘unofficial command paper’ that attempted to answer this question. The discussion inevitably ranged more widely – touching on the social fall-out of the crisis, and including a plea for a greater emphasis on the teaching of economic history in universities. But it was with The Queen’s question in mind that the two convenors of the meeting, Professor Tim Besley FBA and Professor Peter Hennessy FBA , subsequently drafted a letter summarising the discussion: it was sent to Buckingham Palace on 22 July. MADAM, When Your Majesty visited the London School of Economics last November, you quite rightly asked: why had nobody noticed that the credit crunch was on its way? The British Academy convened a forum on 17 June 2009 to debate your question, with contributions from a range of experts from business, the City, its regulators, academia, and government. This letter summarises the views of the participants and the factors that they cited in our discussion, and we hope that it offers an answer to your question.
    [Show full text]
  • DC1058 Annex Complete
    Annex 1 The Secretary of State’s letter to Gavyn Davies and press notice 152 Review of the Future Funding of the BBC 2-4 Cockspur Street London SW1Y 5DH Telephone: 0171-211 6975 Facsimile: 0171-211 6249 From the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport THE RT HON CHRIS SMITH MP Gavyn Davies Esq OBE Partner Goldman Sachs Peterborough Court 133 Fleet Street LONDON EC4A 2BB 30 November 1998 Review of the Future Funding of the BBC I am very pleased that you have agreed to make time to chair the independent review panel; I know how busy you are. I am writing today to let you have some further information on the role of the panel. As you are aware, the BBC’s Royal Charter guarantees the future of the Corporation until 2006. A separate formal Government Agreement with the BBC guarantees the licence fee until the end of March 2002 and provides for a review of the funding arrangements before that date in the light of technological and other developments. The level of the licence fee until 2002 in based on a five-year settlement announced in April 1997 following an independent assessment of the BBC’s funding needs. The settlement amounts to a cumulative change for the five years from 1 April 1997 just below the level of changes in the RPI (RPI minus 0.08%). The level of the licence fee post-2002 will be looked at separately in the run up to 2002. Extent of the review The review will be a closely defined one.
    [Show full text]
  • Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Present Successes and Future Problems
    HOUSE OF LORDS Select Committee on Economic Affairs 3rd Report of Session 2003-04 Monetary and Fiscal Policy: Present Successes and Future Problems Volume 2: Evidence Ordered to be printed 19 October 2004 and published 11 November 2004 Published by the Authority of the House of Lords London : The Stationery Office Limited £24.00 HL Paper 176-II CONTENTS Oral Evidence Page Mr Len Cook, National Statistician, Mr Colin Mowl, Director of Macroeconomics and Labour Market and Mr David Fenwick, Director of Consumer Prices and General Inflation Division, Office for National Statistics Oral Evidence, 9 December 2003 1 Professor David Rhind, Chairman, Mr Richard Alldritt, Chief Executive and Mr Martin Weale, Commissioner, Statistics Commission Written Evidence 17 Oral Evidence, 16 December 2003 18 Supplementary Written Evidence 29 Mr Christopher Allsopp, Head, Mr Geoff Tily, Member, Mr Andrew Holder, Member and Mr Michael Williams, Member, Allsopp Review Team Oral Evidence, 13 January 2004 48 Mr Jon Cunliffe, Mr Nicholas Holgate, Mr Christopher Kelly, Mr Andrew Lewis, Mr Stephen Mitchell and Mr Jitinder Kohli, HM Treasury Oral Evidence, 21 January 2004 63 Written Evidence 78 Mr Mervyn King, Ms Rachel Lomax, Mr Charles Bean, Ms Marian Bell, Mr Richard Lambert, Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee members Oral Evidence, 27 January 2004 86 Mr Ciaran Barr, Chief UK Economist, Deutsche Bank Oral Evidence, 3 February 2004 106 Mr Willem Buiter, Chief Economist, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Oral Evidence, 10 February 2004 121 Sir
    [Show full text]
  • The First 50 Years of the Government Economic Service Lecture by Dave
    The First 50 years of The Government Economic Service Lecture by Dave Ramsden 27 April 2015 1. [Slide 1] Welcome to King’s. Thanks to the Strand Group at the Policy Institute here at King’s and to Hewlett Packard for hosting this lecture and to all of you for attending.1 2. The Government Economic Service (GES) was created in October 1964. The new Wilson Government, with a majority of four, embarked on a more planned approach to the UK economy.2 The Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) was created with a longer term mandate, with HM Treasury meant to focus more on its Finance Ministry role. 3. [Slide 2] Several of the new Special Advisers were economists, including Robert Neild,3 who re-joined HMT. Alec Cairncross, as Head of the Treasury’s Economic Section the Government’s chief economist, worked to ensure the section stayed under civil service management. It did and Cairncross in his words “ended up with the title Head of the Government Economic Service. Ironically the Economic Service has survived to this day while the Economic Section vanished in the 1980s”.4 4. Ironically, because the fledgling GES, 22 strong of whom 18 were already in the Economic Section, was for Cairncross “at first largely a fantasy”, with little influence over staffing or resources. 5. As we are well into 2015 we can mark another anniversary: 100 years ago in 1915 Keynes started working in the Treasury.5 1 I would like to thank my colleagues Lisa Barrance, Andrew Gurney, Leeanne Johnston, Nayeem Khan, Nick Macpherson, Charlotte McKinley, Jake Nelson, Mario Pisani, James Richardson and Daniel Tomlinson for their help and comments.
    [Show full text]
  • Renewing Our Monetary Vows: Open Letters to the Governor of the Bank of England
    RENEWING OUR MONETARY VOWS: OPEN LETTERS TO THE GOVERNOR OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND i Renewing our Monetary Vows: Open Letters to the Governor of the Bank of England National Institute of Economic and Social Research Occasional Papers 58. © National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2019 National Institute of Economic and Social Research 2 Dean Trench St London SW1P 3HE T: +44 (0)20 7222 7665 E: [email protected] W: niesr.ac.uk Registered charity no. 306083 ISBN: 978-1-9162584-0-2 ii THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH Occasional Papers LVIII RENEWING OUR MONETARY VOWS: OPEN LETTERS TO THE GOVERNOR OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND Edited by Richard Barwell and Jagjit S. Chadha iii NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH OFFICERS OF THE INSTITUTE PRESIDENT SIR PAUL TUCKER COUNCIL OF MANAGEMENT PROFESSOR DIANE COYLE (CHAIR) TERA ALLAS STEPHEN KING ALEX BAKER DR JOHN LLEWELLYN SIR ALAN BUDD KEITH MACKRELL NEIL GASKELL NEVILLE MANUEL SIR DAVID GREENAWAY PROFESSOR LORNA UNWIN DIRECTOR PROFESSOR JAGJIT S. CHADHA SECRETARY DR JOHN KIRKLAND 2 DEAN TRENCH ST, SMITH SQUARE LONDON, SW1P 3HE The National Institute of Economic and Social Research is an independent research institute, founded in 1938. The vision of our founders was to carry out research to improve understanding of the economic and social forces that affect people’s lives, and the ways in which policy can bring about change. And this remains central to NIESR’s ethos. We continue to apply our expertise in both quantitative and qualitative methods and our understanding of economic and social issues to current debates and to influence policy.
    [Show full text]
  • Inflation Targeting in Practice: the UK Experience
    Inflation targeting in practice: the UK experience Speech given by John Vickers, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Bank of England At the conference on Implementation of Price Stability, Frankfurt November 1998 1 All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx Inflation targeting in practice: the UK experience In this speech,(1) John Vickers, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Bank of England, discusses theoretical and practical issues relating to inflation targeting as used in the United Kingdom during the past six years. After outlining the role of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, he considers the Committee’s task from a theoretical perspective, before discussing the concept and measurement of domestically generated inflation. Introduction we make decisions, how we seek to explain them, and how we are held accountable for doing the job we have been Six years ago this week, sterling left the exchange rate given. mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System, and dropped by 7% from DM 2.80 to DM 2.60. But since Next, though my task is to discuss inflation targeting from falling below DM 2.20 in l995, sterling has risen to levels the practical perspective of UK experience, I shall take a higher than before its exit from the ERM. In an economy as detour and discuss a sort of converse question: how might open to international trade as the United Kingdom, one UK practice appear from the perspective of the theory of might have expected that such large swings in the price of inflation targeting? Then finally, and returning to the theme foreign exchange would destabilise domestic price inflation.
    [Show full text]
  • Britain's Money Supply Experiment, 1971-73
    Britain’s money supply experiment, 1971-73 Duncan Needham University of Cambridge [email protected] CWPESH no. 10 Abstract: This article challenges the claim that monetary policy neglect was responsible for the unprecedented UK inflation of the 1970s. It departs from the historiography by showing the Bank of England following money supply objectives from 1971, two years earlier than is currently acknowledged and five years before Denis Healey first published a money supply target. 1 After missing its monetary objectives in 1972-73, the Bank concluded that tight control of the money supply was impracticable in the UK. Conservative policymakers drew the opposite conclusion, that only tighter control of the money supply would cure Britain of its economic ills. This failure to heed the lessons of 1970s monetary policy would have profound consequences for the British economy in the early 1980s and beyond. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Sir Samuel Brittain, Sir Alan Budd, Sir Douglas Wass, Martin Daunton, Charles Goodhart, Anthony Hotson, William Keegan, Jim Tomlinson, two anonymous referees and the participants of the Cambridge Finance seminar, the Winton Monetary Seminar in Oxford, and the Monetary History Seminar in London for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. One referee expressed reservations about the use of ‘monetary target’ before 1976 while acknowledging that the phrase was in use in policy circles at the time. Therefore, unless the phrase is contained within a quotation, I have used ‘monetary objective’ prior to 1976. 1 For an alternative approach, please see F.H. Capie, The Bank of England: 1950s to 1979 , (New York, 2010).
    [Show full text]
  • Monetary Policy Committee
    RESEARCH PAPER 99/17 The Monetary Policy 18 FEBRUARY 1999 Committee: theory & performance. This Paper looks at the history of the first year and a half of the Monetary Policy Committee. It examines the reasons given for its establishment, describes its actions and assesses its impact. Timothy Edmonds ECONOMIC POLICY & STATISTICS SECTION HOUSE OF COMMONS LIBRARY Recent Library Research Papers include: 99/2 Unemployment by Constituency - December 1998 13.01.99 99/3 Tax Credits Bill Bill 9 of 1998-9 18.01.99 99/4 The Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill: 'Age of consent' and abuse of a 21.01.99 position of trust [Bill 10 of 1998-99] 99/5 The House of Lords Bill: 'Stage One' Issues Bill 34 of 1998-99 28.01.99 99/6 The House of Lords Bill: Options for 'Stage Two' Bill 34 of 1998-99 28.01.99 99/7 The House of Lords Bill: Lords reform and wider constitutional reform 28.01.99 Bill 34 of 1998-99 99/8 Economic Indicators 01.02.99 99/9 Local Government Finance Settlement: 1999/00: England 02.02.99 99/10 Treatment of Acid Mine Drainage 02.02.99 99/11 Employment Relations Bill 1998-99 Bill 36 05.02.99 99/12 Social Security Contributions (Transfer of Functions, Etc.) Bill [HL] 05.02.99 Bill 38 of 1998-99 99/13 Iraq: "Desert Fox" and Policy Developments 10.02.99 99/14 The Asian Economic Crisis 11.02.99 99/15 Unemployment by Constituency - January 1999 17.02.99 99/16 Immigration and Asylum (forthcoming) Research Papers are available as PDF files: • to members of the general public on the Parliamentary web site, URL: http://www.parliament.uk • within Parliament to users of the Parliamentary Intranet, URL: http://hcl1.hclibrary.parliament.uk Library Research Papers are compiled for the benefit of Members of Parliament and their personal staff.
    [Show full text]
  • Economic Policy, with and Without Forecasts
    Economic policy, with and without forecasts Speech given by Sir Alan Budd, member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee Given at the Sir Alec Cairncross Lecture November 1998 1 All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/speeches/default.aspx Economic policy, with and without forecasts In this speech,(1) Sir Alan Budd, a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, discusses the debate between those who believe that monetary policy should be based on a small number of current indicators and those who use model-based forecasts to assist their decisions. He argues that all policy-makers use forecasts, implicitly or explicitly, and all respond to current indicators. He describes the role of the inflation forecast in the MPC’s decisions. My topic this evening is the use of forecasts in economic In August,(3) he discussed the MPC’s concern with the policy-making in general and their use by the Bank of output gap, and records his preference for monitoring England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in particular. nominal demand. He said: Although this lecture is dedicated to Alec Cairncross, the ‘As an immediate step I would give more weight to actual first part of it is devoted to, or perhaps directed at, another inflation as distinct from rarefied speculation about its trend economist whom I greatly admire and respect, namely in two years’ time’. Samuel Brittan. I am particularly sorry that he is not here this evening. It would clearly be grossly ill-mannered to Finally, two quotations from his article ‘An Inflation Target conduct a dispute with him in his absence, so I hope that it is Not Enough’.(4) Again, this article is mainly about his will be recognised that I want to question some views about view that monetary policy should be directed at nominal forecasting that are widely shared, and of which GDP (ie total spending in the economy), rather than at Samuel Brittan is certainly the most eloquent, and possibly inflation alone.
    [Show full text]
  • Budd Revisited - Gambling in Great Britain 15 Years On
    Budd Revisited - Gambling in Great Britain 15 Years On Dan Waugh Introduction In 2000, Sir Alan Budd, the noted economist was asked by the British Government to chair a review of the nation’s gambling laws. The resulting ‘The Report of the Gambling Review Body’ (referred to here as ‘The Budd Report’ or ‘Budd’) was published a year later and provided a blueprint for how gaming and betting would subsequently be regulated under a major new piece of legislation - the Gambling Act 2005 (the ‘2005 Act’ or the ‘Gambling Act’). The work of the Gambling Review Body (the ‘Review Body’) was undertaken at considerable expense and effort – more than 200 submissions were evaluated, 20 evidence gathering sessions were held, a number of overseas jurisdictions were visited. In the end, a 201-page report was produced. The Review Body’s 176 recommendations for how gambling ought to be regulated were based upon a set of explicitly stated policy objectives designed to further the interests of the British consumer - balancing extended choice with enhanced protections. It was the last time that gambling was subjected to such intense scrutiny in Great Britain; the last time that such a wide variety of regulatory options were weighed with such consideration. It is to be lamented that in the 15 years since the publication of the Budd Report – a period of profound change in the British gambling market – there has been no systematic attempt to assess whether the ambitions of the Review Body have been achieved. The aim of this essay is to do precisely that – to examine how gambling in Great Britain has developed through the prism of Budd’s aspirations.
    [Show full text]