British B.C. It may not improve the country’s competitiveness

Toby Melville/Reuters

Bank of England (BoE) headquarters in London.

The Bank of England (BoE) does not have enough resources to carry out the additional objective of keeping the UK a competitive global financial centre, a central bank official said on Monday.

The British government is set to unveil a bill this week to use post-Brexit “freedoms” to set its own financial rules.

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But lawmakers have shown reluctance to give regulators a secondary task of competition, fearing it would mean a return to the “light touch” regulation that bailed out banks a decade ago.

“The standards that the UK currently has are very internationally recognised,” said Marjorie Ngwenya, who was chosen by the Ministry of Finance to be the new external member of the BoE’s Prudential Regulation Committee (PRC).

The PRC makes the most important decisions of the BoE’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), whose top priority is keeping banks and insurers healthy and protecting policyholders.

“I am not sure at this stage whether the PRA has sufficient resources to consider this new objective,” Ngwenya told a confirmation hearing by Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee.

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