The shadow chancellor John McDonnell has warned that the Commons Treasury committee risks becoming “toothless” after it emerged that all of the Conservative MPs on the influential committee have past connections to the finance industry.
Parliament is due to vote on Monday to confirm the election of the 11-member panel of MPs which is responsible for holding the Treasury to account on financial policy, as well as questioning the Bank of England and banking industry bosses. McDonnell said there were questions over the Tory selections.
Four of the six Tory MPs on the committee worked at banks – including NatWest, JPMorgan and Lehman Brothers. Another, Anthony Browne, elected as the Tory MP for South Cambridgeshire in December, was previously chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the leading lobby group for the sector, until 2017.
McDonnell, said: “This confirms yet again that the Tory party is run lock, stock and barrel by the City and bankers. The Treasury committee will now become toothless, refusing to hold the finance sector to account.”
Campaigners raised concerns that MPs tasked with holding the banks to account on behalf of the public had backgrounds in the sector.
Nick Dearden, director of the Global Justice Now campaign group, said: “This all suggests that this government will give big finance prime position as it recreates Britain post-Brexit. If so, the rest of us will pay an even greater price for the financial instability, the draining of wealth from the rest of society and dodgy tax practices bound to ensue.”
Mel Stride, the Conservative chair of the Treasury committee, is the only Tory MP who did not work in finance before entering politics.
The former junior Treasury minister founded Venture Marketing Group, an events and exhibitions organiser that lists financial firms including Barclays and KPMG on its website among clients, as well as companies in other sectors such as Vodafone and McDonalds. Stride is no longer a director of the company, which he founded in 1987. He owns more than 15% of shares in the firm, according to the parliamentary register of members’ financial interests.
The four Labour MPs and one SNP member selected for the committee did not previously work for banks. The number of MPs from each party on the panel is designed to reflect their strength in the House of Commons.
Westminster sources said that having committee members with direct experience working in the financial sector could help parliament hold banks and the Treasury to account, as poachers turned gamekeepers with in-depth knowledge that politicians might not normally possess.
One former Labour member of the Treasury committee said Browne did not perform badly at the BBA, after the former journalist was brought in to rebuild the organisation in 2012 in the wake of the financial crisis. The BBA has since been rebranded as UK Finance after merging with several other industry lobby groups.
Past members of the Treasury committee have often been drawn from the ranks of MPs with career experience in the City; including Jacob Rees-Mogg, who started the investment management firm Somerset Capital and Andrea Leadsom, who worked for Barclays as a debt trader before becoming managing director of her brother-in-law’s hedge fund, De Putron Fund Management.
Campaigners including the SME Alliance, a group of small business owners lobbying for fair treatment from banks, said it was important to wait and see if the committee held the industry to account before rushing to judgment.
Fran Boait, executive director of the campaign group Positive Money, which acts to pressure financial regulators and the industry to serve societal interests, said that it was important for members of the committee to “prove they are able to stand up for the public interest”.
“The Treasury select committee is a key source of scrutiny for a banking sector which is funding environmental breakdown, cutting off access to cash and seeking to gain a deregulatory dividend from Brexit,” she said.
Mel Stride declined to comment on behalf of the Treasury committee.