Chancellor Alistair Darling in futile bid to urge banks to offer more competitive rates on loans

Chancellor Alistair Darling in futile bid to urge banks to offer more competitive rates on loans

In a meeting at the UK Treasury today, the Chancellor told a posse of bank chairmen, (many of the banks, the very ones bailed out by the British taxpayer) to reduce excessive interest rates and to stop further increasing them along with associated charges such as arrrangment fees.

Julian Bray comments: "Many Small to Medium Enterprises [SME's] make up the majority of registered businesses in the UK and few have access to alternative forms of overdraft and loan finance. They simply have no option but to rely on High Street banks and at the whim of a spotty junior bank executive working from an pre-recession inflexible computer driven credit lending evaluation process, could see overdrafts cancelled overnight and the business goes bust.

"The Chancellor saddled with Browns Treasury legacy and a pile of ineffective political policies; has only just woken up to the fact that having chided the banks for excessive lending and not keeping a financial cushion in their reserves (cleared capital) is now wondering why the banks are falling over themselves to build up capital with cheap money."

"Many of the banks due to the bail out process are ironically owned by the taxpayer who is effectively also the major shareholder, but still unable to benefit in any material way from the low Bank of England set bank rate. in effect banks have openly have used the bail out money to kick start the process of capital fund building, rather than use the bail out funds to create new lending for business.

"Freeing up credit was the original intention by government but someone with a set of badger shaped dyed eyebrows forgot to make it a prime binding condition of bailing the banks out. No worries its just put everyone in the UK on a thirty year austerity regime and seen pension plans evaporate as the rapidly ageing population face widescale penury"

Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable who has relentlessly flagged op the flaws in the said: “It is amazing that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has only just woken up to the fact that this is a problem. We have been warning about the lending crisis, including in Government-owned banks, for months.

“The problem isn’t just about the cost of borrowing, but the difficulties which many companies who are solvent, with a good credit history, have in obtaining bank credit without unreasonable demands for personal security and charges.

“It’s time the Government stopped being a passive investor in the nationalised and semi-nationalised banks and ensured that they maintain lending to good British companies for the wider interest of the national economy.”