Select Committee · Treasury Committee

Capital inquiry

Status: Closed Opened: 16 Dec 2016 Closed: 3 May 2017
Inquiry scopeThe financial crisis revealed that banks were holding insufficient capital relative to the risks they were taking. It also demonstrated that, in the absence of means to re-capitalise failing banks from private sources, the taxpayer would be forced to fund bail-outs of banks which were judged too big to fail. Ensuring that banks could be recapitalised if necessary without recourse to taxpayer funding, is therefore of crucial importance to the UK economy. Parliament has a key role to play in assessing whether the rules and institutions created to achieve this aim are working, or will work, properly. The Treasury Committee examines recovery and resolution in the first stage of its capital inquiry.