FSA to publish report on HBOS failure, but not B&B

21 July 2011 1:56 pm | By Steve Tolley, Nicole Blackmore

The FSA will publish a report on the failure of Halifax Bank of Scotland, but says it does not intend to publish a similar report on Bradford & Bingley.

In a letter from FSA chairman Lord Turner to Treasury select committee chairman Andrew Tyrie, sent earlier this month, Turner says the public has a right to know what happened to HBOS.

The letter says: “Once the investigation process is completed and the final result announced, we would intend to begin work on a report into HBOS, providing an account of the developments over the years preceding the crisis which put HBOS in an unsustainable position in autumn 2008, and identifying any deficiencies in the FSA’s regulation and supervision of it.”

It adds that doing so would be appropriate whatever the outcome of the current enforcement investigation.

However Turner says: “We have considered whether similar public information reports should be published in relation to other firms that failed in the crisis. We believe not.”

Turner says this is because a bank failure does not in itself constitute a regulatory failure, and none of the other institutions that failed in 2008 were “of the scale” of RBS and HBOS.

In December, the regulator agreed to publish a summary of its findings into the failure of RBS and its regulation of the bank, after initially refusing to do so.

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