Is this really the moment to scrap bankers’ bonuses?

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – keen to sharpen the City’s competitive edge, we’re told – wants to remove the legislative cap, imported from Brussels in 2014, that limits bankers’ bonuses to 100 per cent of their base salary, or up to 200 per cent with shareholder approval. That raises interesting questions. Was the cap a good idea in the first place? If not, why wasn’t it binned as soon as we left the EU? Is now the ideal moment to do so? And are bankers still a breed of greedy bastards?

The answer to the first question is certainly not. This column called the cap a ‘boneheaded’ measure that would merely provoke wily moneymen to find ways of gaming an unwelcome restraint on their wealth. Its stated aim was to discourage a return to the excessive risk-taking of the mid-2000s, but banks themselves claimed it increased risk by adding to their fixed costs as base pay rose accordingly. The then chancellor George Osborne challenged it in the European Court but was beaten back. The scheme’s promoters and true believers were left-leaning MEPs – led by a British Lib Dem, Sharon Bowles, now luxuriating in the House of Lords – whose real aim was to punish the Anglo-Saxon financial community for the sins that preceded 2008.

As to why the cap still applies, 20 months after we left the EU, the answer is that scrapping it during Covid would have looked wildly insensitive and it was probably never on Rishi Sunak’s agenda. Does that make now the right moment? Of course not, but Kwarteng needs markets onside for his borrowing plans and can argue that the City must be free to compete with New York on all fronts, including pay. If he scraps the cap later, when hardship is more widespread, the public response will be even more hostile.

And the ‘greedy bastards’ question? Yes, ‘let’s make nothing but money’ – the slogan of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns before its collapse – still applies throughout much of the financial world. But its remuneration system, hedged about with deferrals and clawbacks, is far more closely aligned to longer-term performance than in the bad old days. Like much else, it will be more efficient and transparent without an overlay of ill-designed EU regulation.

Bring on the banking hubs

Bank branch closures continue apace: more than one in three across the UK in the past decade. Free ATMs are disappearing almost as fast. But amid the panorama of problems ahead, does that really matter? ‘Give it a rest,’ you might be thinking, ‘I pay by card everywhere. In fact I don’t even use a card, I just wave my phone like magic money. And if I need anything else from a bank, I chat to a bot.’

Bully for you, but many others still rely on real money and wisely so, because diminishing cash is the simplest budget control and card debt is painfully pernicious. Small businesses need banks too: think of the news-agent who’s a National Lottery franchisee in a town that no longer has paying-in facilities.

All this will become more evident in the coming recession. Post offices, pubs, cafés, corner shops, libraries, town halls, churches – and, nowadays, food banks – are the vital threads of social fabric, and banks also have a role. So a scheme announced last year to create shared banking hubs in places that have lost cash facilities was a good thing and it’s a disgrace that only two of the first ten chosen sites have opened – at Cambuslang in Scotland and Rochford in Essex. Another 13 hub towns have been named, but all rather tentatively and subject to ‘review’. A Cambuslang councillor says the hub is ‘busier and busier’ and ‘bringing life back to the high street’. As other town centres go cold this winter, the least the banks can do, in their own reputational interests as well as the public good, is make sure the hubs happen.

Savers’ sacrifice

Here’s another thing banks should be doing: paying commensurate deposit rates as official interest rates rise – up another step this week, perhaps topping 4 per cent next year. Savers were effectively told in 2008 by Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, that their returns would have to be sacrificed for the greater good as rates plunged to avert economic meltdown. Fourteen years later, interest is still negligible while capital is being eaten by inflation, as is the value of most pensions.

But according to analysis by Deutsche Bank, high-street banks are currently overflowing with cash: they have no need to compete for deposits, no incentive or obligation to offer more attractive rates. And yet again, it’s the frugal elderly who will feel the chill.

Back to work? Yes, Ma’am

Did we all take too much time off for mourning? It was clearly wrong of the NHS to postpone vital appointments and idiotic of Center Parcs (which rapidly backtracked on the decision) to tell guests to go home for a day so staff could watch the funeral. But what of all the other closures, from supermarkets and factories to Royal Mail deliveries? ‘Respect’ was mentioned in every shuttered window, but the Construction Leadership Council was also honest enough to mention the ‘reputational risk’ of building sites being seen to be busy.

No employer admitted not wanting to pay overtime on days when business was likely to be quiet, but that was surely a factor too – while many furlough-softened workers relished extra time off. And none of this can have helped the UK’s productivity deficit, even if the awesomeness of the funeral itself attracts a wave of tourist spending and inward investment. Famously inscrutable as to her personal opinions, the Queen has suffered in death a surfeit of speculation as to what she might really have thought about anything and everything. But knowing her own work ethic and concern for our collective wellbeing, I feel sure she’d be urging us to switch off the telly, get off the sofa and kickstart the economy again.