 Yn y ddin iddynt, mae'n dysgu i ddim yn ystyried hyn gyntaf y cael ei ffordd mwy ffordd. Felly, roedd yn fyddo i'r ffordd llwydydd yn ymhanes eu chymdeithas yn ddiwrnod. Mae'r ffordd llwydydd wedi ysaf bod rhai ar ffordd llyfrgynghau ar gyfer yw llygodau. A dyna gynhyrch chi'n gallu'r gyfer y ffordd llyfrgynghau ar hygyrcesydd mewn dyn fryn â'r cyfrune. Ysaf y llydw i ddim yn yraedd, ond mae'n edrych yw'r cyfrin hwn yn yma ymgylchedd a'r debatau a'r dda chi'n dweud yn gallu bod yn cael ei ddlwn. Dyna hwnnw gweld yn fawr, rydym yn ymdodod fel ychydig fel tymau. Yn oedd yn amlwg fel oedd. Felly mae name am Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, a ond rydyn ni'n bwysig i gydag ddiweddio gwbl y panel yng Nghymru. Prif, ond ben yw'r ffair, ar y ddych i'w gwirionedd y ffordd a ym mwyaf yn gweffredig. So Cristean Berry is a PhD student at Berry and is a freelance researcher such as we have Annalise Daud who is Labour MP in the shadow treasury team, i can't pronounce words today, we have Fran Boeath, who works for Positive Money and on the far left but again only in terms of where she's sitting Catherine West, who is the MP for Hwns in Wood Green. Welcome to our panel, and are we kicking off with you Annalise? Sorry, with Fran. Sorry Fran, no worries. Thanks everyone for coming, it's really exciting to see such a big audience, bigger than Positive Money's fringe last year in Liverpool. I'm the director at Positive Money and I just want to put us in a bit of context. So, we're ten years on since the financial crash. UK wages have stagnated for the longest time since the Victorian era. We've got record low interest rates, record high debt to GDP, record high asset prices, record high current account deficit, a lack of demand and secular stagnation. Stock markets are hitting all-time highs and the number of UK millionaires has increased by 41% over the last five years. The same time, low paid works proliferating, food bank use is soaring and one in eight workers can't afford three meals a day. And we're part of a bleak global picture. Well, 1% of people own 45% of the world's wealth and to top it off, scientists say we've got just three years before catastrophic climate changes unleashed. Of course, there's very many more upsetting and scary, terrifying stats I could have mentioned, but the point is they're all connected and they're all symptoms of very deep structural issues all around us. And one way to understand what's going on is we're in the midst of crisis of economic thinking or political economy. Ten years ago, the crash happened and the mainstream school of thought of economic thought neoclassical economics spectacularly failed to predict it and then they spectacularly failed to explain how it happened and what should be done. At ten years on, civil society has responded, positive money exists, so do great organisations like the Finance Innovation Lab and we've all critiqued the financial sector other organisations like the New Economics Foundation too. And leading thinkers have written lots of books criticising the economics establishment but in the halls of power in the Bank of England and Whitehall, the same economic thinking that got us into that massive crash still persists. And the failure to really question how the crash happened and to turn the shock of it into a programme of reform meant that the crisis morphed into a perceived crisis of government spending and across the world we saw countries implementing austerity programmes absolutely backed by the IMF and the OECD at the time and so what ended up happening is that the people that did least cause the crash suffered the worst from it and it's clear to some extent that thinking is going back to pre-crash times. So Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England has said recently that the UK should double the size of its financial sector over the next 25 years and that post Brexit the UK should become Europe's investment banker. Now the idea that either of those things are in line with the Bank of England's mission which is to promote the good of the people of the UK is completely unfounded. So absolutely no evidence to show that a massive financial sector relative to the size of your economy is any better at producing good resource allocation or better returns for savers or investors. In fact if anything the opposite is true because the financial sector is by its very nature rent seeking then actually a bigger financial sector results in extracting more and more wealth from the rest of the economy. So it should be a cause for concern not celebration. And the city's contribution to growth and jobs is vastly outweighed by financial instability where it's estimated the last crash cost the UK £7.4 trillion. And if we look about how things are in the good times it's pretty dismal too. A very small amount of new bank lending actually goes into the productive economy. Less than 10% of new bank lending goes to businesses. The vast majority goes to property and financial markets which results in the UK having an oversized financial sector, housing bubbles and people have to top up their incomes by taking on more and more debt. And despite delivering negligible social benefit the financial sector has a massive subsidy and our banks enjoy a massive subsidy from the public sector. As many positive money supporters will know and others banks have a very unique privilege of creating our money when they make loans and they're able to do this in the knowledge that if any of those loans go bad the taxpayer will step in to protect citizens' deposits. And this state protection means that they can enjoy a massive subsidy give depositors almost no interest whilst charging really high rates of interest on the loans that they give out. And the effective subsidy has been calculated to about £25 billion a year. And when there's a recession of course the UK banks stop lending altogether and a massive bailout in the last crash was the UK government about £133 billion. But I said the true cost in terms of output and jobs has been estimated much higher at £7.4 trillion. So what can we do? Well in the UK we have five big shareholder banks which dominate the market share and there's a lot that we should do with them and I think Christine's going to talk a bit more about that. But who should be holding society's interests first? Well there are big public macroeconomic institutions the Bank of England and the Treasury. There is a sense that the Bank of England realises that we can't go back to pre-crisis thinking. Mark Carney caveated his statement about doubling the size of the financial sector saying that we also need tough regulation. So it's clear that he thinks the financial sector needs to be tamed but not changed. And it's clear that there's not really been any discussion in the halls of power about what is the purpose of finance and how do we make sure that it serves society instead of us serving the financial sector. So we were positive money were founded with a bit of a radical idea to challenge the way money is created. And we realised two things very quickly. First it's a taboo to talk about money creation. Hopefully it's less of a taboo now. And secondly there's very little understanding about this. And we saw some of this misunderstanding in the election when Theresa May for example questioned what told a nurse she couldn't have a pay rise and there is no magic money tree. Now of course it wasn't just her lack of the monetary system that led her to say that there's also political ideology at play. But very few people are aware that we have two magic money trees. Commercial banks when they make loans and central banks. And most of the most powerful central banks have been undertaking massive money printing programme since the crash called Quantitative Easing. In the UK the Bank of England has created £445 billion and that's flooded financial markets. Pushing out asset prices. The idea being it should trickle down to the real economy but that clearly doesn't work. Maybe in 2009 we could have accepted that quantitative easing is maybe the best tool available in a hurry. But in 2016 when the Bank of England decided after the Brexit announcement to create a further £70 billion which to go into financial markets which we knew would push up asset prices we knew would increase inequality when wealth inequality in the UK is really threatening social cohesion. The idea that that's the best policy that they could come up with is really unacceptable. So positive money knew that it's quite difficult to get any attention on Bank of England policies. So we kind of tried to mobilise people power and we had a campaign saying that the bank shouldn't be doing these policies including corporate QE where the Bank of England is actually picking corporations to buy bonds in. We have protested twice outside the Bank of England we've got 10,000 people involved and we managed to persuade the Treasury Select Committee to launch an inquiry into monetary policy and the effects it's having on the wider society and the economy. Unfortunately that inquiry got shelved at the election but we're calling on the Treasury Select Committee to reopen it and Nicky Morgan who's the new chair to reopen it. Since the crash it's clear that central banks' powers have been extended further than ever before and we're starting to understand that its decisions really do affect every aspect of economic life and there's a growing understanding of how monetary policy and financial regulation have implications for climate change housing and inequality and we think it's crucial that Labour have a plan for how to make the bank an engine of fairer and a more sustainable economy and not just a servant to the financial sector. So we're calling on Labour to complete its review of the Bank of England that it started in 2015 which was a great step forward and to look at the whole picture of how the bank operates including its mandate, governance and relationship with the Treasury and policy tools. In these very uncertain and highly turbulent times what is clear is that the most powerful economic institution central banks are not being adequately scrutinised and if what emerges from the current breakdown of the current system does not seek to democratise central banks and the financial sector at large, then it's unlikely that we will get to a truly fairer, more democratic and more sustainable economy. Thanks. Annalise? Lovely, thank you. If you don't mind I might stand up so that I can see everybody. I have to say in about four years of working on economic issues as a politician this is the first time that I've been just with women I don't mean to bang on about it but it really is so uncommon that I've just had to start by saying that to also first of all we thank positive money for their tireless campaigning and awareness raising on the issue of the accountability or lack of it of the British monetary system and I think the positive money's aspiration to ensure that money in the banking system works for society and not against it is surely something that many of us would want to work towards. Obviously it's now a crucial time to be debating all of these issues exactly as we saw from the title of this and there we have different parts of government with quite radically different opinions on surely one of the most important issues of our age. As has already been mentioned the inflation rate is riding high at the moment it has been subject to more public debate than for a very long time driven by exactly factors that were mentioned the fact that people are feeling their living standards being pinched with wages obviously not keeping pace with costs but more positively I think we also now have some labour announcements particularly as of yesterday which are trying to face up to some of those systemic issues with our economy. I'm not going to bang on about them because I know that Catherine is going to talk about them later but I think that's in a context where we're seeing particularly high levels of consumer debt not being dealt with by government not being taken seriously not being viewed as an issue for democratic intervention with the response always coming back we're going to get the Bank of England to look at this and government trying to resile for many responsibility in that area many people in this audience will be aware of Labour's car slate review of the Treasury which was released in February I think a lot of its recommendations ring truer now than ever above all as I mentioned before the Treasury really needs to focus on economic management as well as financial control but I do think it's important that Labour has committed in office as well as the work that we've already been doing out of office to continuing that review and having fundamental questioning of both how the Treasury operates and how the Bank of England operates we set out the criteria within the car slate review that we want to apply to the Treasury whether there's inaction where action should be taken when action is being undertaken in the wrong way or inappropriate actions and I think we need to have a similar approach when it comes to the Bank of England as well and there are international lessons I think we can draw from here if we look at the Swedish case for example where there was quite a thorough review about the central bank's mandate involving a range of stakeholders maybe we can learn from that obviously Labour has also set out our industrial policy as well richer lives before the general election and it's shown how we feel we can have far greater levels of support for investments in infrastructure in the real economy in Britain and of course we desperately need that and I was checking out the OECD figures for last year about the growth rate of growth in investments in 2016 the increase in investment in Britain was half the G7 average a third of the OECD average and a sixth of the EU average so we keep being told by the Government that we're performing very well that's actually what's happening to investment in our country obviously Labour's set out how we'd have a national investment bank which would be backed by a set of regional investment banks which hopefully would provide much stronger investment into those growing sectors particularly with then for example green energy where we really need to develop the technologies of the future and I think that would be buttressed also by a commitment not to have the kind of regulatory that we've seen from this Government which has prevented investment in sectors like green energy when they've suddenly switched off support for onshore wind farms for example suddenly switched off and support for energy efficiency there is of course a debate about where investments should come from I appreciate that, I've been really interested with what positive money said about this the debates around people's QE I think it's a very important debate I think it is a more challenging debate simply because we've got such a weak pound and people are aware that that is contributing to our crisis and living standards so it might be harder maybe to have that debate but we should keep having it I think it's very important ideas out of the discussion on people's QE but I also think we mustn't throw the baby out with the bathwater because there are a lot of other things I think that positive money has been seeing and obviously heard some of them today which we really need to retain we do have to subject the operations of Bank of England, the banking system overall and the Treasury to far greater democratic oversight and I think we clearly had a number of suggestions from Fran in that regard some others I suppose that I would add are the fact that we have very little understanding of where bank financing goes in our country actually funnily enough we've got a bit more than in some other countries which is disturbing but we don't have much more beyond postcode area data around that investment from banks to make appropriate legislative regulatory and financial decisions we really need to have a better understanding of where that money is going because it's not regionally distributed surely in the way that we would want it to be apparently we're going to have slightly more differentiated data soon coming around levels of debt in different areas but we need to know about levels of lending as well and we don't know about that to the extent that we could and should do is obviously helpful also as was mentioned it surely goes without seeing that the extreme concentration of investment in property in Britain remains a significant concern it's not one that I feel regulators or policymakers have dealt with at all clearly if we had a rapid reduction in house prices that would lead to negative equity and repossessions many many negative consequences but the current upwards ratchet at least in some areas of the country is very concerning particularly when that seems to be crowding out other kinds of investments and in some context as in New Zealand central banks have acted against for example subprime lending there have been some negative consequences around that but I think we do need to consider how public policy can help to prevent extremely rapid rises in the top of the property market as well as perhaps within those consumers who might find it difficult to pay back their lending the other thing that I would say just one other challenge before I round up is that this debate is of course occurring in a situation where we're having less international coordination around financial standards than we've had for quite a long time because the US has effectively under President Trump decided to resile from many of those mechanisms which although they weren't perfect we're at least attempting to for example ensure that there would be capital ballast in our banks and so forth we have now a movement away from those regulatory developments it's not an area which many members of the public are particularly engaged in or aware of despite the potential impact that another financial crisis could have on all of them we really need to change them and again I think change that again I think that's one reason why positive money's work has been so important because it is engaging people in these financial issues in a way that they haven't been maybe before so just to finish off as many people here will know Labour members and others we are continuing as a party our analysis of different economic policy options at this conference and in a programme of economic policy events that are being held across the country that are organised by the Shadow Chancellor I'm sure there's some people here being to some of them before we're going to be having more of them so I'm looking forward to hearing the debate today and hoping that we can continue to pose difficult but important questions about how we can make Britain richer for everyone in the future thank you Christine is this working? it is I can't I was just about to say I'm going to stand up but I'm going to have to lean forward in a slightly menacing way I don't think anyone's ever described me as menacing so it's probably not that menacing you guys are a little bit menacing there's a lot of you it's really it's really amazing to see so many people in a room to talk about financial reform like Ali said it does feel like something quite extraordinary is happening here this year I've been doing these kind of events for quite a few years and I'm not sure I've ever spoken to quite as big a room as this at a fringe event to talk about financial reform so that's very exciting Fran and Annalise kind of set the scene a bit as Fran put it the crisis of economic thinking that we're living through at the moment and the extent to which really we're still trying to solve that crisis with the same flawed thinking that created it so I just want to talk a little bit about how that plays out specifically in relation to the banks themselves the structure of the banking system and the ways in which that hasn't changed since the crisis and the ways in which maybe it needs to change in the future so I'm going to talk about three ways that the banking system needs to change and two immediate priorities that I think the movement needs to be focusing on right now 10 years on from the crisis it does feel a bit like we're back to business as usual and I think as someone who's also like Fran been involved in some of the organisations and teams within existing organisations that started to try and get to grips with what was happening in the finance sector after the crash I think now is a good moment to take stock of what was achieved or not achieved in that window of political opportunity after the crisis and where we go from here I think really the problem in the immediate aftermath of the crisis was that civil society just wasn't equipped to respond didn't have the capacity or the expertise to really know what it wanted when it came to changing the financial system and so the debate was allowed to default to kind of quite narrow and quite mainstream near liberal terms so both in terms of things default into a sort of lowest common denominator quite personalised bankers bonuses where the people should be put in jail for the other which of course it's not that that's not important but it was far from sufficient to really kind of understand and tackle the structural causes of the crisis and then on the other side you had regulators and politicians who were applying the very same near liberal logic that arguably caused the crisis to resolving it so regulators still talk a lot about competition as the panacea that's run with the banking sector to the extent that I had a really extraordinary conversation with an official in BIS as it then was before it became BIS about the German banking sector which I'm going to talk a bit more about in a minute and which we often hold up as an example of how Britain could change its banking sector and how the German banking sector delivers much better outcomes for people, for the economy and all the rest of it and this official said oh yeah but it's very interesting, we've just done some research and it turns out that actually the German banking sector, there isn't more competition than there is in the UK so maybe the German banking sector isn't so great after all and there was just no no comprehension, no possibility that it might occur to him that when you look at that evidence the thing that you might want to be questioning is not the functioning of the German banking system but the desirability of competition as your panacea solution silver bullet solution for fixing the UK banking system even crosses mind, it was just extraordinary so I think there are much kind of deeper issues structural issues that we need to address and we now have a pretty good idea of what those are I think 10 years after the crisis we may not have managed to get there in time to influence the way that the debate went after the 2008 crash but we have a pretty good idea of how the sector needs to change and it's already been touched on by some of the other speakers it needs to be democratised it needs to be diversified and it needs to be put at the service of the real economy so maybe to take diversity first and that's in contrast to countries like Germany who have a much more diverse ecosystem of public banks at different scales so national investment bank regional and local public banks cooperatives, credit unions and which perform better on a whole host of outcomes and this also contributes to regional inequality as well Annalise touched on industrial strategy the vast majority I think around a third of small business lending among banks still goes to London and the south east and something like 7% to the northeast 3% to Wales so the regional balance of lending is still massively skewed which again is in very stark contrast to countries like Germany which have a more geographically diversified banking system which have local banks that are rooted in their communities have a mandate for those communities we just don't have that here and if anything actually things are worse now than they were before the crisis because this lens has not been brought to bear on the way that banks have been regulated so for example the co-op bank which wasn't quite a real corrupted bank but let's leave that to one side for now when it hit problems and had to be bailed in as the kind of terminology then was has been sold off to hedge funds and so is now just another shareholder owned bank behaving much the same way the last trustee savings bank in the UK has had to close and one of the reasons it gave that it had to close was the burden of regulations that were designed around the interests of very big banks with very complicated business models that were just really difficult for a small quite simple bank like Airdrie to comply with so we've kind of gone backwards rather than forwards on that stuff and it's not just that the system is not diverse enough it's not just that it's a monoculture it's a monoculture of a particularly dangerous type so shareholder owned banks as a business model uniquely dangerous I suppose uniquely ill-equipped in their current configuration at least to serve the real economy because of the focus on short-term profit maximisation host of reports after the crisis that's found this and there's a huge amount of international evidence that countries that have more banks that are run for the interests of stakeholders beyond just shareholders whether it's customers whether it's publicly owned banks mutuals, credit unions etc that those countries and that those types of banks perform better on almost any measure you care to look at whether it's rates for depositors and for borrowers whether it's the amount that they lend to small businesses to the real economy geographical diversity of lending keeping more branches open locally how they get rated on customer service almost any of these metrics that you care to look at there's a huge amount of evidence that we need to promote not just you know more diverse types different types of banks but particularly more what where I used to work called stakeholder banks which are just missing increasingly from our landscape at the moment and thirdly that part of the reason why shareholder owned banks are so kind of so dangerous and have become so dangerous is the way their business models have evolved which I think Fran sort of touched on a sort of traditional banking model where they would take in deposits and they would make loans to a model where their main source of funding is borrowing from other banks and one of their main activities in terms of you know where they lend and how they invest the money that they create is securitisation of packaging up loans and selling them on rather than keeping them on their own balance sheets where they have a genuine interest in you know whether that loan is going to be paid back or not and that creates a whole host of systemic risks and I think Annalise has been was working in the European Parliament on a kind of misguided attempt to revive securitisation which the banks the big banks had persuaded European policy makers was the way to kick start small business lending and economic growth you know despite all of this evidence to the contrary that actually these banks were part of the problem and not part of the solution when it comes to those issues so just very quickly because I'm sure I'm probably over time already where are we now and what can we do next so there are two things I think that are really critical for progressives that care about building a better banking sector at the moment I think the Labour manifesto by the way has made a brilliant start is actually really strong on a lot of these issues and the strongest one that I've seen for Annalise touched on National Investment Bank and the network of regional banks that is supposed to support it but something else that was in the Labour manifesto which is pretty close to my heart because it's a dweeby hobby horse of mine that I campaigned on quite a lot when I was at Neff is reforming RBS the bank that we already own we as tax payers still own RBS which by the way is still the poster child for almost everything that's wrong with our financial system whether it's reckless lending, whether it's exploiting small businesses, you name it whether it's fossil fuels and unsustainable lending, you name it RBS does it we have the opportunity to transform RBS into the poster child for everything that our banking system could be so Neff put proposals out for years ago to turn RBS into a network of local banks owned in trust for the public good modelled on the sparkhouse and in Germany and I think there's real value both practically and also narratively to pushing the government very hard particularly now when they've kind of accepted that they can't sell RBS off in the foreseeable future because the prospective losses are just too huge well you know they should at least review their options for what they're going to do with it instead and secondly Brexit which we kind of haven't talked about much today so far but I think you know maybe is a bit the elephant in the room to the extent that Brexit is going to reshape the banking sector for better or for worse you know anything except a very soft Brexit will see to varying degrees some kind of international complex wholesale activities shifting overseas potentially to kind of Frankfurt or Paris and the question is how we respond to that you know I think Fran alluded to this Mark Carney comment about the UK becoming Europe's investment bank you know there are two routes that we could go down given that this disruption is coming because of Brexit you know either we can take the opportunity to try and refocus our banking system on the domestic economy instead of becoming supposedly the goose that lays the golden eggs but in reality arguably a millstone around the neck of the economy we can turn it into a system that is actually designed to build up other sectors you know to support our industrial strategy and so on and so forth or we can go down this really terrifying Boris Johnson, Liam Fox of trying to turn ourselves into effectively the tax haven of Europe to try and attract you know maybe less groupie or more risky financial services activities into the country as more mainstream banks start to leave for European centres and I think that is a huge choice facing the country really critical time for progressives to be putting forward a really clear and compelling vision of what sort of economy we want after Brexit and of how we can have a financial system that supports that rather than undermining it, thanks Catherine West I'll be very brief because I know that we want to hear very much from you but I thought as the 10 year anniversary I was just doing a little list and I'm sure you can shout out some of your favourite things about the banking crisis so the PPI in this selling the LIBOR interest rate scandal the foreign exchange scandal the speculation and the bank branch closures on our high streets the overdraft fees that keep getting charged to people who have bank accounts the lack of support for SMEs and the bonuses and the huge pay ratios that there are between the people at the top and the people who clean the offices in banks and as a London MP it's just so obvious when you walk through parts of London just that huge kind of gap between the financial services and everybody else who lives in London I did a lecture earlier on in the summer which brings together some work that I did in 2010 when I was a council leader of an in a London borough and looks at what it's like to live and lead a council in an area where you've got very very wealthy people who basically walking the same streets as people who are going to food banks because they haven't got enough money even though they're in work haven't got enough money to put food on the table for their children and I'm going to mention some of the really practical things because have we got any councillors in the room? We've got three, four because there's lots of things that you can do at a really local level that can take the edge of some of the things very much in your locality but I just thought I would add to a couple of things that didn't get mentioned one really is the consumer credit, the element of that which is student debt and we know that that's the case because that's now coming up to the 6% which the government wants to levy on that debt for students who obviously are carrying well over 30,000 if you study nursing at the London Metropolitan University my local university for people who want to study nursing if you don't, if you have to borrow to help with your living costs you come out with a debt of £54,000 and you start at the Whittington hospital or at UCH and you work for about £21,500 to begin with as a nurse so how you're ever going to pay your £54,000 back I don't know but I think in a snapshot that does give you a bit of a sense of what we're up against and if some of you are readers you might have read Thomas Frank's work who's a US writer he came to Parliament and I hosted an event for him and he thinks really this is why Hillary Clinton didn't win the election it's all because of the 30 year kind of lag in wages and the flat wages that people have experienced in working class America and that's his whole thesis it's not got as much to do with the racism and everything I mean that's like icing on the top the fundamental issue is just a sense that people feel that their children are not going to do as well as they have and if there's anything we want as kind of human beings it's to know that the younger generation is going to do better than what we have just very briefly on some of the really structural things that we keep getting told because we're in a crisis we can't deal with them and we know that housing is a massive one if we just allowed local authorities to borrow against their assets if we were to build new homes and kept it as a public enterprise which was not driven by developers we would be able to do much much more on the housing front and that's the biggest thing we can do on infrastructure in London and the south east in the north on transport where perhaps housing is not as much of an issue although I think in some parts the north it is but often it's about the fact that when you get on a train between Preston and Blackpool the quality of the train it's a bit like being in the former where as if you're in London and you jump on the train you feel like you're in a really moving place and that just can't be the case in the same country that we live in on the regions as well the regional investment bank is a fantastic idea and we know that for example the skills and apprenticeship question you see all companies and public bodies are now being charged the apprenticeship levy which is a good concept in itself but it's actually a failed government program because we know that the number of apprentices who are staying in their apprenticeship battle on skilling people up so that they can get the higher pay job so that we can get the tax take that we need so that we can improve the productivity of our society very briefly on what we can do and it was very good to hear John McDonald yesterday talking about only allowing people to borrow twice what they would be able to pay back that's a fantastic practical thing that everybody can understand on the street as well and that's the other thing that I was going to add to your comment about the manifesto so many of these things were really easy to sell on the doorstep and when you're going in an election or when you feel like you're in a constant election period it's really good to have things that most people can understand in my lecture I talk a lot about what we did as a borough and obviously we supported very strongly our local credit union does everybody here belong to the credit union? somebody's got a hand up, good join the local credit union borrow from them, they've got great deals and we also assisted the credit union with what was started out being alone from the local authority but ended up that they kept that so that they had just a little bit more ability to do better loans for local people when people became tenants as local authority tenants we immediately signed them up with a passbook so that they could start saving a credit union rather than having to go to a bank which was ripping them off and we also have a really good scheme in Haringey borough which is my own borough of having all year six children having 20 pounds in an account so that they go into secondary school with a bank account with a credit union which is another fantastic scheme once again all around the edges but it's a start because I think if we think when the crisis is over we're going to do all these things we'll never do them so you do have to introduce them the only thing that came out of the fairness commission which was the work that we did in 2010 that we couldn't do as a local authority was to stop the payday lenders we had a big campaign we even got like a blow up shark because of the loan sharks and we stood on the high street to stop people going into these loan shops and we tried to basically stop the wongers of this world and the other companies and in the end that had to go through parliament so that's what Cella Creasy did on that but once again this is what we've just got to do really with primary legislation so my big issue with Brexit and I feel as though I haven't stopped talking about Brexit all this week but I think is to make sure that it is used as an opportunity to intervene so how can we intervene and stop some of these money day lenders how can we intervene and stop some of the higher purchase shops which are selling washing machines which would retail for 250 pounds and by the end of the period people have paid 2500 for them these are really basic things but we can do them and we can empower local authorities to tackle those across the regions and we can use that wonderful resource which we have which is local government so I'm going to stop there I'm going to thank you very much the charities that do all the work on debt and also to say does anyone here volunteer for their CAB or involved in their citizens advice bureau please go and volunteer at your CAB we need more good labour people who are happy to give a couple of hours a week at the CAB and learn how to counsel people in debt unfortunately the quality across the UK is not what it should be and our CAB have constant problems on training up to the quality that we need people some of them are excellent and other people with other experiences are really patchy and you can tell as a constituency MP and I know Annalise will be the same that some people coming through the door are really low incomes it's people in the middle who are just absolutely walloped with the sorts of credits that they've taken out and we need to get in much much more quickly before mental health and all sorts of other problems take over so sorry not to be more positive but vote for labour government and we'll be able to put into practice many of these exciting initiatives thank you